


The Road Ahead Of Us

by elisa_anya



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Angst, F/M, Fluff, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-14 03:01:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14761343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elisa_anya/pseuds/elisa_anya
Summary: Dean is given the task to mate you and impregnate you within a year but you want nothing to do with him. You try running away, but he finds you. You try begging him to let you go, but he refuses to give in. Eventually, there's only one thing left you can do; getting to know him.





	The Road Ahead Of Us

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: this fic contains gifs and a picture which were not made by me. In the notes at the end, I will list the tumblr users who created the gifs you're about to see. Unfortunately, I don't know who is the original author of the picture, if any of you know please let me know.
> 
> Enjoy.

You wake up with a start and turn around, frightened by the sudden hand shaking your shoulder. Dean is looking at you carefully, withdrawing his hand quickly now that you’re awake. He looks tired, grey shadows have started to show under his eyes, but he still manages to give you a small smile. Not that you care about the tentative gesture of peace he tries to make; no, you hate the guy with all your might. Dean fucking Winchester, the guy that chased you around the country, the one that claims to be your Alpha because a piece of paper fucking says so. He deserves no smiles of yours, in your opinion.

“Found a diner. Thought we could get breakfast,” he says, nodding towards the small shop, and immediately after he yaws loudly, throwing his head back and all. “You barely ate anything yesterday, you must be starving.”

 _Did he drive all night?_ _He’s gonna get us killed, the imbecile,_ you think angrily, using any possible excuse you can come up with to hate him and insult him.

You don’t reply, you never do. You haven’t talked to him since he’d found you three days ago. The last time you said a word to him, you were crying and begging him to let you go but he didn’t listen, he didn’t care. He put you on handcuffs and dragged you away, no matter how much you pleaded, how much money you offered him to release you. He was a good soldier and he was going to see this order through; he had to mate and breed you, his designated Omega.

You’d always feared this day would come, the day an Alpha was finally appointed to you. When you presented as an Omega, your mother had been so proud; an _honor,_ she’d called it. She even cried and called all her friends to brag about you, much to your embarrassment. Omegas were precious, rare creatures, so they were all required by law to mate in order to provide more Omega pups to their country; it was a service to the nation, quite much like enlisting in the army, as most Alphas were required to do. You were given plenty of time to choose a mate of your own, but if you didn’t before you turned 30 years old, the government would appoint you and every other unmated Omega an Alpha. You’d tried going out with a few Alphas, you really did tried to do the whole ‘fall in love, get married, mate and live happily ever after’ story but it had never worked out, there was just something missing, that stupid _spark_ everyone who was in love kept telling you about. There was always something that would break the relationships off; first there was that one Alpha that was hot as hell but unbearly jealous, he wouldn’t even let you hang out with your male friends without bearing his teeth to them. Then there was the guy that wanted you to be a stay-at-home Omega if you ended up mated, never mind you’d been to college for frigging years to become a surgeon and your career was taking off smoothly and effortlessly. After that guy came one that could handle your success and was a decent guy as well, but he was boring as sunday mass and everytime you two fucked, you couldn’t help but go over what groceries you needed to do later. As the years went by and you started to feel the pressure of your upcoming 30th birthday, it just became harder to date normally; if you didn’t make a connection right away, you moved onto the next guy quickly, desperately seeking a mate you could fall in love with before the time was up, but in the end the feared date came around before the big love of your life had a chance and with it came a fat envelope from the government with instructions on how to proceed and details on your appointment Alpha: Dean Winchester, a Sergeant of the US Army awarded with two medals of honor for his courage, mechanic engineer, young and strong and ready to serve you, ready to _breed_ you.

You were no ignorant, you’d heard horror stories about Alphas from the National Omega Breeding Program who had showed up to reclaim their omegas and had jumped right into the goal of their mission before their partner could get a say on it. They ended up pregnant and mated to a bunch of assholes who all but discarded them afterwards. You weren’t going to let the same thing happen to you so you threw your clothes into a bag and ran away that same night, unable to sit at home and wait for this complete stranger to show up at your house and claim you, rape you, all within the laws of your country. Since you were now Dean’s responsibility, he was the one who had to go chasing after you as you tried to flee, but he found you somewhere in Canada a little over two months later. You fought tooth and nail with him, but damn he was at least a head taller than you and a whole lot stronger, and it didn’t take much of an effort for him to take you away. After crying yourself to sleep on the backseat of his car the first night, you’d stopped talking to him at all.

Dean sighs, looking up at the morning sky for a moment before he jumps out of the car. He walks around Baby ( _who the hell calls their car Baby?_ _I swear, this fucking guy…_ ) and opens your door, waving his hand for you to get out of the car.

“Come on, this hunger strike is getting ridiculous, [Y/N],” he mutters, an slight edge of annoyance in this tone. He closes his eyes for a moment, takes a deep breath to calm his temper, and then says, friendlier this time, “I’ve been here before, the food is really good, okay? Now let’s go, you have to eat something _._ ”

You consider sitting there, but what would be the point of fighting him on this? Now the car’s engine is off, he can hear your stomach growl in protest; you _are_ , in fact, starving. You’ve barely had anything to eat since your first encounter with him. All this time you’ve been silent and refusing to do anything he asks, very much like a child, but you can’t help it, annoying him is the only thing that you are in control of and it gives you a little bit of pleasure; he can take you by force, alright, but you are going to make his life just as miserable as he is going to make yours.

But your stomach twists and growls shamelessly again, your body begging you for _something_ to digest, anything at all. Truth be told, at this point you want food more than you enjoy annoying him. You feel very lightheaded, dizzy, and you are so hungry, somehow even your _back_ hurt, so with a frustrated sigh, you get out of the car. Your legs feel stiff after so many hours of driving and it feels nice to stretch them. You throw your arms up in the air and also stretch your back, which makes a weird, cracking sound. The sun gets reflected on your handcuffs and you squint your eyes with a groan as you put your hands down.

Dean walks a step behind you as you march towards the diner in silence, surely ready to chase after you if you decided to try to run away again (because, of course, you had tried to escape by foot twice since he got you, which you’d learned was futile because the bloody Alpha was fit and fast as speeding car, it’d be impossible for you to outrun him unless you shot him on the leg or something). You push the door of the diner open and let is close right behind you, hoping Dean would hit his face with it. A couple of curious eyes turn around to see you walk in and their eyes inevitable end up on your wrists and the handcuffs around them. You know right away they know you’re an Omega that run away (because you’re not the first who has tries to do it and you certainly won’t be the last either) and that Dean right behind you is your Alpha. You feel the same shame and embarrassment you feel every time that happens and you sit quickly in the closest booth, looking to hide your hands under the table as fast as possible. If Dean notices your discomfort, he doesn’t mention it at all as he sits down in front of you.

A woman over her 50s comes right away to serve the two of you, sharing a friendly smile with the two of you; she’s obviously not seen your handcuffs.

“Hello, dears. Nice weather for travelling, huh?” she comments happily.

You look straight out the window, keeping your face neutral. Dean gives you a disapproving look before he turns to the waitress.

“Yeah, the road’s been calm too,” Dean replies, forcing a smile onto his tired face.

“So what can I get you? We’ve got some pretty good smoothies to get your morning started properly, if you’re interested.”

Dean looks expectantly at your for a couple of seconds, but when you don’t even turn to look at the waitress, he sighs and turns again towards her, ignoring the curious look she’s giving the two of you.

“I’d like some coffee, as strong as you can make it, and some waffles. She’ll have… bring some orange juice and- and that fruit dish thing,” he points at something on the menu and she leans closer over the table to take a closer look before she nods.

“Alright, I’ll bring your order in a minute.”

As soon as she’s gone, you’re unable to help yourself when you turn around to shoot daggers in his direction. You had vowed not to speak to him, but the wires in your brain are all crossed due to lack of food and sleeping like shit for days, so the words just roll out of your tongue without permission. “So you’re gonna be _that_ type of Alpha, huh? You’re even gonna tell me what to eat? You can have waffles and I have to eat fruits?”

Dean inhales sharply, lifting his eyebrows in surprise. He’d almost forgotten what your voice sounded like. He’s shocked you’ve _finally_ spoken to him, after the countless times he’s tried to make you engage in conversation, and now you finally have, he kind of wishes you hadn’t said a word at all. You can visibly see him make an effort to calm himself before he replies.

“Fine, have the waffles if you want,” he says, and you’re strangely disappointed that he doesn’t pursuit the fight you were trying to start, “I just thought your stomach might be too sensitive for waffles, you haven’t been eating much lately. That was it. But go ahead, have as many as you’d like, I’ll order some more.”

“You think you can buy me with waffles?”

He rolls his eyes and throws his arms up for a moment. “Jesus, there’s just no winning with you, is there? Have waffles or don’t have waffles, I don’t care, but next time the waitress asks you want you ask, don’t ignore her and then take it out on me.”

He sighs with annoyance, leaning forwards with his arms on the table. His military dog tags slip out of his shirt, dangling from his neck just in time for the waitress to see them as she comes back with your order.

“Oh, you’re military man?” she asks as she sets the dishes down between the two of you.

“Yes, ma’am” Dean nods. “She’s gonna have the waffles after all,” he mutters as he takes the bowl of fruits and the waffles, and switches their positions on the table so now you get the big stack of carbs with chocolate on the top instead. He looks down at the fruits, grimacing, and it gives you pleasure to see his discontent.

“You know what? I’ll bring you another plate of waffles. On the house, for the service you did to our country.”

Before Dean can stop her and tell her it’s not necessary, she’s hurrying away towards the kitchen again.

You scoffs, shaking your head in disapproval. “I can’t believe they’re giving you free waffles for killing people.”

The look in Dean’s face actually scares you for a moment and you fear you’ve crossed a line; you’ve been poking the bear for too long, maybe this is when he snaps and strikes back. You hold your breath and try not to squirm under his murderous glare. Is he going to yell at you in front of everyone or, worse, hit you? But finally he only clenches his jaw tightly and looks away, not saying a word to you for a long minute as he fixes his eyes on his car outside. When he finally turns back to you and speaks, he does it in a whisper as he obviously still struggles to keep himself from raising his voice.

“You know, I’m really trying to be friendly here, alright? I don’t need that bullshit kind of comment from you, you’ve no idea what I’ve done or where I come from.”

“I don't want you to be friendly, I want you to let me go,” you hiss back at him through gritted teeth, slamming your hands on the table to reveal your handcuffs in accusation, like he doesn’t already know they’re there. You wince in pain as soon as the metal digs into your skin; having them on for so long has started to irritate your skin, which has always been kind of annoyingly delicate.

“You know I can't do that,” he laments, his tone softening as he looks down at your hands and the red skin on your wrists.

“Then at least uncuff me, it's humiliating to walk around in these,” you plead while still trying to sound strong, demanding, chewing the insides of your cheeks when the constant contact of metal and skin sends painful stings shooting up and down your arm.

“I can’t do that either. If you hadn't tried to escape _twice_ , I wouldn't have had to cuff you.”

“If you weren't trying to kidnap me-”

“I am not kidnapping you. I am _responsible_ for you.”

“Oh, yeah, my sweet Alpha of a savior who is going to rape me the first chance you get when my heat comes, I am so relieved to have you looking out for me,” you spat, your voice breaking with a sob at the end. You inhale sharply and look away, trying to hold back your tears. You don’t want to cry in front of him again, you don’t want to seem weak. Knowing your heat is probably a few days away only makes everything worse though, and your fears have been bottling up for days now more than ever, almost to a breaking point. As soon as you’d turned 30, the government cut your supply of suppressants and you aren’t exactly sure when your heat is going to hit, but you know it’s probably going to be soon… And then Dean is going to take you, claim you, whether you want it or not, and the thought of it makes your stomach sick.

“You really think I’d do that to you? You think I _like_ this situation? You think I enjoy being assigned an Omega who hates me, who _fears_ me? This isn’t what I had in mind when I pictured myself finding a mate either, alright? So why don’t you give me a freaking break?”

Some people turn their heads around to look at the couple fight. Dean’s intense glare makes them turn back around on their seats right away. The waitress comes back; this time she seems uncomfortable and you think probably everyone in the diner has heard your conversation or parts of it, no matter how much both of you had tried to keep it down. She sets the plates down, smiling one last time at the two of you to be polite but part of her charm is obviously gone, and then retreats without saying a word.

Dean starts to eat fast, almost as if he were taking his frustrations out on the food. You eat slowly, chewing piece after piece of waffle, only to realise he had been right, it was too much for your empty stomach, but you keep going, not wanting to prove him right. While you two ignore each other, you can’t help but go in circles with what he’d just said. _You really think I’d do that to you?_ He’d seemed honestly offended and you desperately want to think he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t dare mate you without your consent even when your heat struck, but it was literally the only reason why he was there and you didn’t trust him at all. There was nothing more you wanted than to have a reason to remain hopeful and this was it, but you were also scared to get your hopes up, to believe that you could avoid this when in reality it was bound to happen sooner or later, it was just a fact.

Once you are back on the road, Dean’s angry frown relaxes. You’ve learned in the short period of time you’ve known him that driving brings up the best in him; he hums (and sometimes sings) along with his endless playlists of rock classics and melts into the leather sit like there is no other place in the world he’d rather be in. At some point while he’s singing along AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long, he turns and asks you if you like that band or the song -another of his endless attempts to engage you in conversation. You look away and continue to ignore him. He sighs and after two seconds of silence offers you to change the music, pushing the box full of cassettes in your direction, but you stay as silent as ever and don’t even glance his way. This is how most of the conversations between the two of you are; unilateral and pretty awkward.

The two of you are supposed to keep travelling that day but only two hours after leaving the diner, Dean decides to pull over and pay for a room in a motel. He looks exhausted to the point you’ve started to fear he might fall asleep on the wheel and kill the both of you, so you’d been stealing glances in his direction from the corner of your eyes during the two hours to make sure he was still awake. Your stomach had also decided to punish you for eating all those waffles and you spent a long hour trying to hold in the vomit as your shifted uncomfortably on your seat, a hand over your hand. If you didn’t hate vomiting so much, you would have considered getting sick in Dean’s precious car just to see his face when you wrecked it… but you _really_ didn’t like throwing up, it was the same reason why you had never let yourself get too drunk, so you held it in until, thank goodness, the Alpha decided he needed to rest.

Once out of the car, you take deep calming breaths and try to walk the feeling off.

“You okay?” he asks you as you two walk towards the room.

“‘m fine,” you reply, barely moving your lips to speak. You try to stand upright and look strong in his presence instead of small and rather sick, but your stomach has other plans and you’re bending over ever so slightly.

Inside the room, you both make a beeline to your independent beds. You curl into a ball and groan, breathing in and out slowly to calm your nausea, while Dean drops on the bed on his stomach and closes his eyes, going limp for a long minute. You roll over to observe him as his breathing starts to get even and slow.

_Is he… sleeping?_

You sit up slowly, glancing at the door, wondering how far you’d be able to get before he woke up and realised you were missing.

“Don’t even _think_ about it,” he mumbles, and you jump. He hasn’t even opened his eyes but by now he trusts you just as little as you trust him.

After a minute he gets up from the bed and walks over to you. As usual, you observe him cautiously, giving him a threatening look that tells him you’re ready to fight him if he tries anything (like you’d be able to fight him off if he did…). He releases one of the cuffs and brings your other arm up to close the newly open end of the handcuffs around the headboard of the bed. He hands you the remote before he lays back down on his bed. This time when he closes his eyes, he doesn’t open them for a good couple of hours.

You had already discovered that Dean had the ability to sleep through a bloody hurricane if he wanted to, so turning the volume of the TV up until it hurt your own ears to annoy him didn’t really work that well. It bothered you more it did him. You watch TV for a while, but in the end you fall asleep too for a little while. At noon, Dean wakes you up rather gently to offer you lunch. You hate when he does that, when he pretends to be this nice person who actually gives a shit about you when he is actually your bloody captor.

“Come on, give me your hands,” he tells you as he kneels by your bed after uncuffing you. His voice is grave with exhaustion and there are still dark semi-circles under his eyes. Only then you notice the bowl of warm water by your nightstand as he directs your hands towards the warm water and massages your red, sensitive skin slowly. You flinch and try to pull away, both because it hurts, even if his hands more quite gently around yours, and because you don’t want him to touch you at all, but he keeps your hands under the water all the same. “Leave them on water for a bit, it’ll help.”

“It’ll still hurt tonight when you cuff me again,” you reply bitterly, the accusation hanging thick on the air.

Dean doesn’t respond and keeps his head low. He knows that’s the truth but he also knows you’ll try to run away again if he allows you to be free. You can see the conflicted look on his face and you almost admit to yourself, for a moment, that perhaps maybe he does feel bad about this whole situation.

“Seriously, though, can we get rid of the fucking handcuffs?” you ask him. You hate how much that sounds like a plead, but you’re too goddamn tired of constantly being in handcuffs. It’s annoying as hell, not to mention it’s started to hurt.

“Sorry, no can do, you're a flight risk. Make no mistake, I would find you again, but I rather not have you running around risking getting your heat without me around to protect you.”

You scoff. You hate that he knows your heat is coming; he can probably smell it on you at this point, it’s bound to be soon. “Yeah, right, to _protect_ me…” you mutter under your breath.

He keeps quiet for a moment as he continues to massage your wrists. You can see see him trying not to react to your comment, yet his fingers remain steady and kind as they move over your skin. He sighs and steals a glance in your direction.

“Come on, [Y/N]...” he finally whispers. He sounds defeated, tired as hell. He looks older, his skin a little greyer, thinner. “We’ve got a long road ahead of us. It'll be easier if we at least try to get along.”

“Easier for who? Easier for you to rape me?”

“Jesus, will you stop saying that?” His eyes snap up to stare into yours defiantly, but there’s definitely hurt in them too. He always reacts the same way when you use that word. You wonder if he hates it as much as you do, but surely his stomach doesn’t turn and twist painfully at the thought of the two of you mating like yours does. This is what he signed up for, after all, this is his job. “I’m not going to rape you! I’m not even going to touch you when you get your heat. We have a year before we're required to conceive a child-”

“10 months,” you correct him.

“We could grow on each other in 10 months. When you’re ready, we'll get pregnant with a pup and then I’ll never touch you again, I swear,” he promises, squeezing his hands around your wrists for a moment, a silent plea for you to listen to him, for a change. “I promise I’ll even let you see other people if that’s what you want. I’ve heard about people who end up falling in love and all, you know? We could still be friends though, even if we never fall for each other.”

“I would never love you,” you hiss, your voice full of contempt and anger. “I read your file, I know the kind of guy you are. Typical macho military Alpha who thinks he is so tough, with your cool car and your leather jacket. You think that gives you the right to own me, because a piece of paper says so? We have _nothing_ in common, you're nothing but another shallow, insufferable Alpha in my book.”

Dean throws his arms up in anger, splattering water all over, including your face, and he walks around the room breathing heavily.

“You’re a fucking piece of work, [Y/N]!” he finally breaks, yelling at you at the top of his lungs. “I used to feel sorry for you, sorry that you ended up in this situation, but now I kinda feel sorry for _myself_ because I am stuck with you for the rest of my life! You’ve got your head so up your own ass that you can’t even _begin_ to consider that you aren’t the only fucking person in the world who is capable of suffering. How fucking terrible it must be to be such a goddamn _asshole_ ! Are you even _capable_ of empathy?”

He takes a chair and he slams it onto the floor. You jump at the loud sound of wood breaking and cringe when Dean locks eyes with you. Before you can even begin to react, he marches across the room and leaves, slamming the door shut behind him with so much force, the windows rattle.

It takes you a couple of minutes to react. The sudden silence seems deafening. When the adrenaline of the fight (which couldn’t have lasted more than a minute) begins to leave you, you’re left shaking on the bed, scared and hurt. You break down in tears for oh so many reasons, you can’t focus on just one as they swim around your mind in a haze, a hurricane of thoughts and fears, and you curl into a ball again over the bed. You cry all you haven’t allowed yourself to cry before in Dean’s presence until it feels like you’ve drained your body from all the tears you had in yourself to shed.

Dean doesn’t return and you’ve no idea what to do. A part of you is screaming at you to fucking run, this is the chance you’d been waiting for, but what’s the point of trying to escape, if you’re being honest with yourself? The Alpha had managed to find you when you’d had an entire country of distance between the two of you, he would find you within a day for sure if you tried to escape now. Also, you couldn’t help but admit that you were scared about your impending heat and that it was a terrible idea for an Omega to wander alone when you were so close to it. The idea of Dean taking advantage of you to mate terrified you, but the other possibility, the one where you’d be running around on your own while you had your first real heat in years, was potentially _dangerous_ and reckless. If any Alpha crossed you in that situation, you’d be fucked, figuratively _and_ literally.

Wiping your cheeks with the back of your hand, you stand up and look around the small motel room, unsure of what to do next. Lunch is still on the table, long forgotten and probably cold, yet there’s still an appealing smell fuming from the cardboards containers. Looking at it seems to awaken hunger in you now that you didn’t feel sick anymore, and in mere seconds you devour the food (chicken and vegetable wraps from Subway, you hate to admit Dean chose well). Then, you decide to take a long shower, taking advantage that your hands are finally free now. You stand under the hot water, letting it rain on you, trying to get a hold on your thoughts. There’s a throbbing pain in your forehead and right under your eyes, as you try to find a way to fix this terrible mess you’ve ended up in, but it’s an impossible equation with too many different variables, there’s just no easy, quick way around it.

And, perhaps, there’s still yet another variable you haven’t considered; Dean. Dean as a person, as an actual human being with real feelings and desires, and not just the Alpha that’s come to ruin your life.

You let out a deep sigh. You can’t get the look on Dean’s face out of your face, a thousand feelings expressed in it and in his green eyes; fury, frustration, hurt, pain, grief. The look of a man who wishes he could be elsewhere, be someone else entirely - much like you. A shy feeling of guilt comes creeping out of some dark corner of your mind and your first instinct is to try to fight it.

_But what if he’s telling the truth? What if he doesn’t plan to force us to mate yet?_

You consider what Dean had offered… You could be friends, with time, or at least people who didn’t hate each other’s guts, people who tolerated each other and had a kid together. You could spend just the one heat together, produce the pup the government demanded you to have, and then you’d never have to touch again... Or at least that’s what Dean said, though there is no real warranty he could give you to prove he’d keep his end of the deal, or that he’d be a decent father to your pup. The two of your would be at the Alpha’s mercy for a long time (you, forever) and you’d bear his mark on your neck for the rest of your life. Even if he allowed you to be with another man, no other Alpha could ever have you like that, you could never mate with someone else, that kind of bond would be forever lost to you. You would be stuck forever with Dean Winchester, for better or for worse, whether he decided to be good to you or your worst nightmare… But weren’t you _already_ stuck with him, anyway?

After you get changed, you go about picking up the broken pieces of the chair and throw them into a garbage bag; it’s destroyed, there’s no way to fix that. It kind of terrifies you to see what Dean’s able to do to a solid wooden chair with his bare hands, although he’s never even attempted to be physically abusive with you, not even when you fought him or when he lost his temper and raised his voice.

Afterwards, you go back to the bed and watch TV while you continue to soak your hands on warm water; he’d been right, it helped with the pain.

When it starts to get dark outside, a part of you begins to get really anxious. What if he doesn’t return? What are you supposed to do then? What happens if an Alpha abandons their Omega? Would the government appoint you another one? You groan at the thought, fearing you’d have to start all over again with another stranger who, perhaps, wouldn’t be as patient and, all things considered, thoughtful as Dean was with you. What if you got someone with a worse temper, someone who wouldn’t so much as hesitate to lift a hand against you if you misbehaved?

Around 8 pm, Dean finally returns and with him comes a strong, inviting smell of food. He steps into the room and you look at each other for a moment, an awkward and tense silence lingering between the two of you. He clears his throat, his eyes dropping as he closes the door, and then he walks slowly to the table and drops the two bags of takeout food he’s holding. He stands there for a moment, his back to you as you sit on the bed, before he turns slowly to observe you.

Dean takes a deep breath as he regards you, trying to read your mood before engaging with you. Whatever your face must look like, he decides you look fairly calm, enough to try to talk to you again. “I’m sorry I yelled at you earlier,” he tells you. He sounds honest and… _sad?_ , you wonder. “I lost my temper, and I- I said some things I regret. I’m sorry.”

You stare back into his eyes, trying to read him too, trying to figure out this stranger before you. Dean shifts awkwardly on his feet while he waits for some kind of reaction. You don’t know what do say, to be honest. A part of you feels maybe he’s right, maybe you’ve been so caught up in your own misery and your fears that you never stopped to consider how he must be feeling, but your survival instincts hold on to the idea that you can’t trust him, that you’ve got to watch your own back and no one else’s because everyone always tries to mess with Omegas. And if you did trust him and then he were to betray you, you would feel like such a fool, you’d be exactly what you swore you’d never be just because of your Omega nature; weak, complaisant, easy.

He exhales deeply when no answer comes from you and drops his entire weight on a chair. The old wood creaks a complaint. “Will you _please_ talk to me? And not just to tell me I’m a rapist or murderer. I’ll reward you with a chocolate muffin,” he attempts a joke, digging for the desert on the plastic bag. He offers it to you, holding it out on his hands towards you, and gives you an encouraging yet still tired smile, but when your silence persist, his smile drops and he averts his eyes, looking hopeless, tired, and lost in his thoughts.

You’re not sure what comes over you and you certainly move not without hesitation, but next thing you know you’ve joined him at the table. He lifts his eyes in surprise as you take a seat across the table from him, and pushes a closed box with food that smells delicious towards you. You open it and inhale greedily the smell of tomato sauce and parmesan cheese.

“I like pasta,” you mumble. It’s supposed to be a thank you, but you can’t quite say those two words to him, your heart still torn between hating the guy and all he represents, and feeling a little sorry for him as well. “And chocolate muffins.”

“I figured you can never go wrong with carbs, cheese or chocolate, right?” he replies a little nervously, huffing a laugh as he steals a glance in your direction.

You actually want to smile at that, and you would have if you didn’t dislike the person sitting in front to you so much, but you don’t, you’re extremely reluctant to give in and be friendly.

You pick up the plastic fork and roll pasta around it. Before you take it to your mouth, your anxiety gets the best of you and you can’t hold back the question that has been running around in your mind all day.

“Did you mean it?” you question him shyly. “What you said before, about waiting until I’m ready to- you know…”

Dean puts his fork down and nods. “I know you’re scared, I’ve also heard really awful stories about Alphas mistreating Omegas in this program, I’m not an ignorant, but I _swear_ to you, that’s not me. Now, I’m not asking you to fall in love with me. You don’t even have to like me, [Y/N]. Hell, _I_ don’t even like myself,” he laughs, but there’s a dark sparkle behind his eyes that you just cannot comprehend. “But please, let’s just… let’s just stop fighting, okay? Your heat’s coming up and it’ll be easier if we are at least on speaking terms.”

“Why? How are you gonna... handle it?”

“I was hoping we would reach my brother’s house before you got it so his wife would help you through it, but I don’t think we’ll make it in time, so I thought we’d settle in a motel, in different rooms, obviously. It lasts like, what, 5 days?”

“Give or take, yeah.”

“I can’t be around you on the first two days, I-” he swallows hard, averting his eyes while his cheeks flush red. “I don’t think I could resists your scent, it’ll be too strong. So, yeah…” he clears his throat, playing with his food. You feel your own cheeks blushing too. You feel slightly uncomfortable knowing that he can smell it on you, your heat fast approaching it, but it’s inevitable with all the time you spend together next to each other on the car. You certainly are constantly aware of his Alpha scent, whether you like it or not, and your body can’t help but react to it, calling to your heat, telling it to hurry up so you can mate already; what a treacherous body you’ve got. “I’ll leave you enough food to last you three days. After that, I think I’ll manage to restrain myself and help you out, if you need me. You know, make sure you have something to eat and drink...”

“So... you’re not going to mark me? Not even knot me?”

“No,” he replies and it sounds sincere, almost like a promise, an oath. He’s looking into your eyes now and you think that if he’s lying, then he’s damn good at it because you see no malice nor any hesitation in his eyes. “I told you, I’ll wait until you’re ready.”

“What if I’m never ready?”

Dean scratches the back of his neck, buying himself some time while he thinks. “Then… I’ll guess we’ll get really drunk and I’ll have to seduce you with a lap dance or something.”

You can’t help snorting, almost choking on your food. The Alpha leans back on his hair, a delirious smile of triumph spreading across his face.

“Did I just make you _laugh_?” he beams, throwing his arms up in victory. He suddenly looks several years younger, even handsome, although you’ll never admit that to yourself.

“I was laughing _at_ you, not _with_ you,” you reply, trying to keep your face neutral again and your tone unfriendly, but it doesn’t come out half as harsh as it used to.

“I ain’t picky, sweetheart, I’ll take it,” he grins.

You narrow your eyes at him at the pet name, but reply nothing further. There isn’t that much conversation between the two of you afterwards. You have a loud argument in the privacy of your mind as you struggle to make up your mind about this guy. A part of you tells you to lighten up, to keep Dean in your good side while you can in order to not make things worse, but another one yells at you to not give into Stockholm syndrome. Sure, Dean seems nice now, but wait until your heat strikes… All Alphas go crazy around an Omega in heat.

But that night, Dean takes a step forwards towards trust when he goes to bed without handcuffing you again, although he hides the gesture with other excuses.

“You’re not gonna cuff me to the bed?” you ask him, raising an eyebrow when you see the man has laid on his bed and seems ready to go to sleep, yet he hasn’t chained you to your own.

“I can practically smell your heat on you, [Y/N],” he replies in a low voice, avoiding your eyes. You can feel heat in your cheeks as a response. “It’d be pretty stupid of you to run away now. Also, your wrists look like they need a break before your heat strikes.”

You feel stupid and incredibly _naive_ for starting to trust the Alpha and though you still try to fight it, the fact that you finally sleep better that night after days of tossing and turning in motel beds and the bloody car, is all the proof you need to know that you’re starting to get soft around the guy. You only wake up once during the night when Dean’s muffled groans wake you up. He does that a lot, nearly every night, when his daily nightmares show up to haunt his dreams. Dean doesn’t sleep much and when he does, he always seems to barely rest at all. You wonder if you should wake him up, but in the end you turn around and fall back asleep.

The following morning you two leave the motel again but you only travel a few hours before Dean abruptly decides to pull over in a motel.

At first you don’t understand what’s the matter, you were supposed to keep driving, but then you realise being cooped up in the car with you and your concentrated scent is starting to drive Dean nuts, probably arouse him, which, much to your annoyance and embarrassment, only makes your body react even more and pushes you closer into heat. You can almost feel it now, the heat on the surface of your skin, the tingling sensation between your legs, the constant way your thoughts get sidetracked into more inappropriate fantasies; tomorrow it is going to hit you for sure.

At the motel, Dean asks for two bedrooms this time and keeps a respectable distance from you even as you walk towards them.

“I’ll go get food to last you a couple of days,” he informs you and doesn’t even make sure you get into your room before he is walking away from you rather fast, breathing in air that doesn’t smell like you like his life depends on it.

He walks to the supermarket to clear his head, knowing that he cannot, for the love of fucking God, go back into the Impala without getting a hard on with that still lingering scent of yours trapped inside it. It’s like a drug, a very addictive one.

Dean takes his phone out and starts texting a message to his brother rather desperately.

> Please get down here as fast as you can, I think I’m going into rut.

> Her scent is killing me, man, seriously, hurry up.

The Alpha had already called his brother for help behind your back. He’d smelled your heat coming, your hormones starting to build up faster and faster the more you spent time together, each other’s scents affecting the other, and though he was quite sure he could get through it without touching you inappropriately, his own rut had begun to build up and now he was a little bit afraid that he’d break against his own will, his body taking over his mind much like yours was about to do. He wasn’t used to being around Omegas, so ruts were not something he had much control over. He needed Sam and Jess to keep him in line, just in case his dick took over his brain. He’d never forgive himself if he broke his promise to you, if he took you at your most vulnerable moment against your will.

He inhales deeply, taking calming breaths, willing the beginning of his rut down as much as possible before he joins your again, and barely spares you a moment when he comes back with the food.

“My brother and sister in law are in the way,” he tells you from his place by the door. You eye him curiously, wondering why the hell he’s not coming in, but you don’t question him. He keeps he door open so air can flow in and keep him from catching your scent. “If I’m, err, _unavailable_ to help you, she’ll fill in for me, okay? She’ll make sure you’re okay.”

You don’t need to ask what that means. Once again, you look at Dean in fear. _Is he going into rut? So soon? What if he loses control? What if he comes in? What if-_

“I’ll see you in a few days, [Y/N],” he nods courtly at you, catching the look of concern in your eyes, and hurries away.

That night Dean can feel your scent changing, even through the walls, from a subtle warning to a strong mating call, one that he knows is meant for him this time. It’s not even the break of dawn when he literally rushes out of his room before he has a chance to break into a rut. He stands in the parking lot of the motel in his pajama pants and t-shirt and sighs deeply with frustration, trying to will his erection down and think of anything but you, inside of that room, naked and waiting for him on a very subconscious level.

“Fuck my life,” he mutters under his breath.

He spends the rest of the night in the car with the windows down to let the cool night’s air wash away your smell, freezing his sorry ass and rubbing his arms with his hands, chasing his own warmth.

You don’t get to rest much that night either. You wake up in the middle of the night with the sheets of the bed sticking to your skin, sweat acting as glue. Your body and mind are lost in a haze of lust and pain, and no matter what you do, no matter how many toys you play with or for how long, nothing satiates you. It’s a good thing Dean had told you to handcuff yourself to the bed because in that delirious state, you can’t remember a good reason _not_ to mate with the guy. He is attractive, there is just no denying it now that coherent thought has been thrown out the window. His face is a fucking piece of art, so handsome you should have cried out with joy when you saw his picture in his file for the very first time, and his years in the army had shaped his body better than a freaking sculpture done by Michelangelo  himself. You want him so badly, need him to knot you and give you that very much needed release with so much intensity that, should you have been able to, you would have gone looking for him if you weren’t tied to the bed. His Alpha scent still lingers in the air inside the room, in your clothes after hours of sitting next to him, and it slowly drives you more and more insane, but you can do nothing but lay there and wait it out.

Dean stays the entire day in the car, surviving on water and cookies just like you while he keeps a watchful eye on your room. He’s an atheist but still prays Sam will arrive soon to keep an eye on him, but before his brother has a chance to make an appearance, two other Alphas show up instead. Dean watches, suddenly sitting up straight in alert, as two guys make their way towards the ice-machine that is just a couple of meters away from your door. They lower their pace, sniffing the air with curiosity, and he just knows they’ve caught your scent.

“Hey, fellas,” he calls them, trying to keep things friendly, but he knows a fight is about to break out, “would you mind stepping away from room 2, please?”

They are close, dangerously close to your door and Dean doesn’t like it one bit. He doesn’t like them, nor the hungry look in their eyes, nor the aggressive posture they are taking. Your fresh heat scent is forcing them into a rut, just like it almost did to him the previous day. Dean stops abruptly as he was marching towards them, afraid to get too close to your room and lose his senses too, so instead he decides to provoke them, to draw them towards him and away from you.

“I know we can all smell that Omega in there, but she’s mine, so if you don’t keep walking, I’m gonna have to quick your asses.”

That’s all it takes for the other two Alphas in rut to jump him. Dean dodges the first, shorter man easily and pushes him onto the floor with an arm as he goes to meet the tallest of his opponents, a guy that is around his height but slightly heavier. The other man throws the first punch, which Dean stops with one arm as he punches him on the gut with his other hand. He’s about to punch him again when the shorter man jumps him from behind and pushes him backwards. He gets punched on the face, not sure by who, and then again and again. He’s throwing punches almost blindly whenever he can, not really caring where he hits them as long as he’s giving more punches than he’s receiving. The shorter guy ends up on the floor first and it takes Dean just a little longer to scare the other guy off, growling as him, bearing his teeth out, blood dripping down his face. Finally defeated, the man helps his almost unconscious friend to his feet and they hurry away. Dean falls on his knees to the floor, panting hard, and spits blood into the pavement of the parking lot.

“Fucking hell,” he mumbles as he tries to catch his breath.

Then your scent hits him. Your beautiful, needy, sweet scent.

He stiffens, the hair on the back on his hair standing up, and he is hard again on his pants almost immediately. He wants to follow the smell to where you lay in bed, every fiber of his being is begging him to get up and stumble his way towards you. Through gritted teeth and hands clenched into fists until his knuckles are a pale white, he fights to concentrate and drag himself away from you and back into the car. Dean’s not entirely sure how long it takes him but somewhere along the line he manages to get inside the Impala. He’s palming himself through his jeans and barely has the sense to look around and check if there’s someone else around in the parking lot before he unbuttons his jeans, drags the zipper down quickly and slips his hand under his underwear. He knows he’s not going to get the true release his body is seeking, but the first stroke is still comforting enough and he lets out a deep breath he’d been holding. He pumps himself fast, desperate to just get it over with, and with the ever lingering scent of you in the car it doesn’t take him long to come in his hand, inside his boxers.

Still panting hard, he cleans his hand with tissues and closes his eyes for a moment.

“It's gonna be a long frigging week,” he mumbles under his breath.

Sam and his wife arrive late on the evening and, bless them, they've brought more food. Jess looks horrified when he sees the state Dean’s face in is but he ignores her concerns and goes straight for the hamburger his brother is offering him.

“What the hell happened to you?” she asks as she gets tissues from her bag to try and clean the dry blood out of Dean’s face but he's got no time for her, he's unwrapping the hamburger so fast he nearly drops it.

“Ran into some Alphas,” he mutters before he takes a first huge bite. “God bless you and this hamburger,” he moans, mouth so full of food his words are barely comprehensible.

“Thought you might be hungry. You've been keeping watch on her door all day?” Sam asks, patting Dean on the shoulder as he devours the meal. He doesn't reply, just nods as he continues to make noises that might sound filthy if they were heard out of context. “I'll rent us another room. You should take a shower, clean your face.”

Sam runs a hand down his wife’s back adoringly, sharing a loving smile with her before he turns away. Jess watches him go for a moment, looking all smitten with him. Dean pretends he doesn’t see it and his heart certainly doesn’t ache with a burning longing to be looked at like that by his own mate.

Jessica then turns towards Dean and observes him for a moment. The worry in her eyes is deep and he knows an imminent heart to heart talk is about to occur, or at least she’ll try.

“How are you, Dean?” He opens his mouth to reply but she interrupts him. “And don't give me no Winchester crap, don't say you're fine and brush it off. Sam told me your Omega has been… uncooperative.”

He huffs a laugh, swallowing down another big bite.

“That's an understatement,” he replies dryly. “Can't say that I blame her, though. She was terrified of me. Still is, I think.”

The pity is her eyes is almost palpable. She gives him a small, encouraging smile. “Don't worry, I am sure she’ll warm up to you eventually, when she realises you’re a good man. But other than that, what's she like?”

“I don't know, honestly. She doesn't speak much.” He hesitates for a moment, but for some reason he decides to share with Jess; there's just something comforting about her, almost maternal. She is, after all, going to be a mother soon; inside that round belly of hers, Dean’s nephew is growing strong day by day. It’s only a couple of months left before they meet the little guy. “I think we had a breakthrough yesterday. I made her laugh, once. Also, I didn't cuff her to the bed last night and she didn't try to kill me in my sleep. I call that a win,” he grins but Jessica knows him better, knows Dean is trying to lower importance of the situation through jokes.

She grimaces, never cracking a smile. “I’m sorry, Dean,” she laments softly, her small hand wrapping around his and squeezing once.

He shrugs like it's unimportant, like he doesn't care, like this isn't killing him. “It'll be alright,” he mumbles and he wants to believe it, desperately, but he's not entirely sure it will. This is not how he’d imagined himself forming a family, but when does anything go according to plan in life for him anyway? “Hopefully she'll relax after her heat, once she realises I am not a- not a-,” the word ‘rapist’ dies in the tip of his tongue. He can’t say it, he hates it, and he’s heard it coming from you often enough that he’s sick of it already. He shifts uncomfortably. “I’m sorry I made you come all this way, but, hmm…” he clears his throat, averts his eyes with embarrassment, and confesses, “her scent was driving me nuts, can't come near her when she's like this. Thought I might be able to help her during the last days, but I'd better stay away for the whole thing. I need someone to watch me, just in case I lose control, and she needs someone to help her too. Would you mind, Jess? Just make sure she eats something, drinks water, you know the drill…”

“Of course, Dean, leave it to me,” she smiles at him warmly, and he feels for her all the love he would have felt had he ever had a sister. In a way, he does now. “You go with Sam, drink a beer, sleep a little… You look like shit,” she smirks.

He scoffs, planting a hand on his chest and pretending to be deeply offended, but even frowning causes a searing stab of pain on the right side of his face. “Yeah, okay, I could use a beer,” Dean mutters as he begins to walk away, not without limping a little bit from his left leg.

When you finally come to, late on the second evening of your heat, you nearly jump out of your skin when you see a woman sitting in a corner, reading a book. You flinch, afraid, and look around in bewilderment, wondering where the hell you are and who is this person. Slowly, you begin to remember; Dean, driving on and on for days, stopping on a motel, the Alpha telling you something about his brother and his wife, your heat growing strong inside you day after day.

_My heat!_

Your skin feels like it is on fire and there is a throbbing between your legs that just won’t subside. You look down and find yourself covered by a thin, rather scratchy sheet. You can tell you’re naked underneath it, no need to check. You barely remember taking your clothes off almost two days ago. You certainly do not remember the woman that has yet to noticed you’re awake.

Trembling hands go up to touch your neck, your heart nearly convulsing with fear and stress as your fingers blindly feel in search of a mating mark. Nothing, there’s no mark, no pain and your body still burns with need and an overwhelming urge to mate.

_He didn’t- he really didn’t-_

You can’t help the small burst of laughter that erupts from you and out of the corner of your eyes you can see the stranger starting and gasping, holding the book close to her chest. You’re too tired to worry about her, though, and now that your worst fear has not come true, you feel as if a huge weight has been lifted off your shoulders. Your head falls back onto the pillow and the stranger is talking to you, it sounds like something distant, something out of a dream, but your eyelids feel heavy and you let your tired body fall back into darkness, forgetting about her just for now; the worst has passed, anything else can wait until you’ve rested a little.

In the morning, though, after you wake up after a particularly strong wave of heat that washes over all your body rather painfully, you see the stranger there again. You sit up, holding the sheets tightly against your body, trying to cover as much as possible. This time, she sees you waking up and calmly puts her book down on the table.

“Who are you?” you demand to know, looking around and sniffing the air, trying to see if Dean’s around. After all, he’s your Alpha now, he’s supposed to protect you, but he isn’t around. A span of anger rushes through you; _he left me alone, with this stranger?_ Then you remember, he _had_ to, or else he would have probably not been able to control himself around you. Once more, you vaguely recall Dean saying something about his family coming to help. “Where’s Dean?”

At the thought of Dean, the memory of his masculine, strong Alpha smell, a wave of heat engulfs you again and for just a moment your sight is white and your body aches with a pulsing need. Unconsciously, you press your legs together, looking for some kind of friction in your core, some source of pleasure, of satisfaction, but you try to stop yourself and go back to reality when you hear the stranger approaching you.

“My name’s Jessica. You can call me Jess. I’m Dean’s sister in law,” her calm voice reaches your ears and you struggle to put a face to the sound, to see again. “He asked me to look after you for a couple of days. As you can understand, he can’t be present in the room at the moment. Take a deep breath, try to calm down.”

You obey her, just because you need to concentrate in something else that isn’t the insistent throbbing in your private region. The feeling is so intense you don’t even have time to feel embarrassed by the situation. After a couple of minutes of taking deep, calming breaths, you finally open your eyes to see the young, blond woman sitting by the foot of your bed, smiling at you in a friendly manner. She holds out a glass of water for you.

“Drink. You barely had any yesterday.”

You frown for a moment, trying to remember of you two even talked yesterday, let alone if she made you have water. You keep a hand secure around the sheets, keeping your body hidden from her, and accept the glass with the other. Only as you put the glass to your lips you notice just how absolutely thirsty you are. Your stomach is totally empty, you can quite literally feel the water running down the insides of your body until it reaches your belly and settles there. In spite of that, your body is so busy with the heat, you don't have time to focus on being hungry.

“You should rest some more,” she tells you in a soothing voice. You almost want to just listen to her, to be complaisant, because the way she speaks somehow engulfs you with comfort and eases your fears away.

“Thank you,” you murmur and again you let your head fall back on the pillow.

“I’ll wake you up with lunch, okay?”

You half shrug, half nod, and continue to shiver in pain and feeling a mix of cold and heat in your body. You’d forgotten just how maddening a heat could be, how you lost yourself to instincts and basic needs, and everything else became annoying, unnecessary; you didn’t want food or water, you didn’t want to talk, you just wanted an Alpha to climb into bed with you, claim you, mate you, knot you, all of it, even if normally that would be the last thing you’d wish for. It was so unlike you and yet you couldn’t help but think of Dean all the time; Dean and his stubble prickling the sensitive skin of your inner thighs as he went down on you, Dean’s hands grabbing your legs and parting them, Dean and his knot inside you, Dean and his pups, Dean, Dean, Dean…

It is dark by the time you regain consciousness. There's a plate with cookies next in your nightstands. Crumbs on the small porcelain plate are proof that you've eaten but you can't remember it at all. Jess is nowhere to be found. You eat some more and drink water with your free hand. The skin around the wrist that has the cuffs locked around it cries out in pain every time you move. It is red and very sensitive, you wish you could take them off but you still wouldn't trust yourself not to do something stupid if you are set free, you keep losing consciousness far too often. This is the first real heat you've had since you were young and started taking the suppressants, and it is like your body forgot how to deal with it and left a mess of you in bed. While Jess is gone you try touching yourself again to alleviate some of the insistent lust, and even though you manage to reach an orgasm (after days of being sexually frustrated, it isn't too hard), there's no real relief. Frustrated, you groan loudly against the pillow and curl in the bed again, hoping to fall asleep or pass out again, anything to stop thinking about Dean and how much you wished it were him and not you who did the touching.

On the fourth day of you heat, you finally begin to feel the temperature on your skin lowering. You feel slightly more in control, more _present._ It is slightly early and dim rays of sunshine are coming through the curtain of the room. Jess sleeps in the other bed. You take a moment to look at her properly; she is very pretty, with long blond hair and appealing facial features. She's a young, pregnant Omega; if the sweet scent coming from her weren't proof enough, her prominent round belly was. You feel slightly guilty having a pregnant Omega babysitting you 24/7 while it should be your Alpha’s job. Though you are beginning to feel just how much you are starving, you decide to let the young woman rest until it is a decent time to wake her up.

You had nearly fallen back asleep when Jess woke up. She takes a deep breath and looks at you with half-closed, tired eyes.

“Oh, hey. You're up. How are you feeling?” she asks you as she rubs her eyes with the back of her hands.

“Better… Hungry, honestly.”

“Well, that's good, it means you heat is retreating,” Jess smiles at you encouragingly and sits on the edge of her bed. “About time too, you've barely had anything to eat lately, I was kind of worried. I’ll make you some eggs, how does that sound?”

“That'd be great, thank you.” Your mouth waters at the thought of some good scrambled eggs.

“I will take the cuffs off now. If you feel you’re about to lose control, I’ll have to put them back, okay?” she explains as she retrieves a small key from her pocket and sets you free. You nod and rub circles over your reddened skin. “Do you feel like putting on some clothes?” Jess asks you as she gets your bag and carries it to you. “You don't have to if it doesn't feel right, I don’t mind.”

Your skin feels itchy and the thought of pulling on clothes doesn't sound appealing at all but you're not about to just walk around naked in front of this stranger, even though she's most likely already seen everything there was to see. While Jess turns around to cook, you put a pair of underwear on (the fabric rubbing against your sensitive privates feels uncomfortable to say the least but you keep your complains to yourself) and an oversized shirt you usually sleep on. You join Jess at the table and your mouth waters at the smell of eggs and toasts. You barely manage to thank her before you dig in. You moan at the first bite and have to remind yourself to chew and not just swallow at once.

Jess smiles. “Bet you are starving, huh?” You nod, not even looking up from the plate. “i sure don't miss getting my heat. One of the perks of being pregnant; no heats. They can be a bitch. You're not going to miss them.”

You tense at the comment and stop with the toast in your hand midair for a moment.

_Let it go, let it go, she's been kind to you, don't say anything, don't snap at her._

But your hormones are all over the place and before you know it, you're throwing her a rather unkind, angry look. “Do you know what getting pregnant would mean for me? It’d mean Dean- Dean would-”

You swallow hard. Suddenly your stomach feels full. You hate that your body still longs for him, even though now your mind is focused enough that you know that isn't what you really want, deep down.

“Rape you?” Jess guesses, her voice low and her pretty features falling a little. “He wouldn't do such a thing. He isn’t that kind of Alpha.”

“You say that because he is your family. Omegas don't speak ill of the Alphas in their pack,” you argue back.

“You do.”

“Well, I am not like most Omegas. I don’t want to be. I don’t want any of it.”

“You know, there's nothing wrong with raising a family,” Jess replies to that, a hand coming to rest in her swollen stomach. “There's importance there too. We can raise new generations, teach them so they're better than us.”

You sigh deeply. There’s just something sweet about her, something that doesn't allow you to stay mad at her. “Look, I am not trying to judge you or diminish you or your decisions. I don't know you. All I am saying is I know this isn't what _I_ wanted. I wanted to be something other than an Omega. I was a damn good surgeon, you know?”

“And who says you have to stop?” Jess shrugs nonchalantly.

You huff a laugh. “Alphas don't allow their Omegas to work after they’ve had pups.”

“Just like you aren't like most Omegas, Dean isn't like most Alphas. Neither is Sam. For example, I am going back to work after our pup’s first birthday.”

Jess gives you a proud smile and wiggles her eyebrows, then bites on a toast. You regard her for a moment, looking in her face for signs that she's lying.

“Really? He's gonna let you?”

“He doesn't have a choice, I would kick his ass if he tried to stop me,” she jokes, smirking.

You're surprised by the answer and her confidence. Omegas don't often talk like that about their Alphas. Curiosity gets the best of you, so you ask her, “what do you do?”

“I am a nurse. On pause right now, for obvious reasons,” she replies, patting her stomach. You suppose she is around 7 months pregnant.

A nurse. Yes, you can see her as a nurse, she's got the patience and kindness needed for the job.

You look down and continue to eat, though not really half as fast as before as you're lost in thought now. A shy spark of hope lights up in your heart.

More shyly, sounding terribly vulnerable despite trying not to, you ask, “you really think Dean is going to let me go back to work?”

“I know he will. And if he ever gives you trouble, you just call me and I will put Dean in his place,” she beams but the comment only makes you cringe. There are so many different ways Alphas are known for putting their Omegas into awful situations. Jess sees your worried face and sighs. “I was just kidding, okay? Relax, [Y/N], you got a good one, I swear. Give Dean a chance. And even if you don't feel anything romantic towards him, you can be friends. I know this must be a tough situation for you, but having an Alpha is great, you don't have to worry about your safety anymore. That claim mark is like a repellent for other Alphas.”

“Yeah, great for you… You got to choose your Alpha,” you retort bitterly under your breath but without any animosity towards her.

“I know… I am sorry about that… I know you don't know me, but trust me, Dean is great. He will be a good Alpha to you.”

You pinch the bridge of your nose and sigh again. Dean is nothing like the type of guy you would have liked to end up with. There was nothing about him in his file that you had found remotely interesting. “He's a soldier, a _murderer_. A mechanic. He's one of those macho types of guys who likes noisy, fast cars probably to make up for something else, most likely the size of his dick. I don't see how he can be a good Alpha to me, we’ve got nothing on common. His greatest accomplishment so far has been not raping me, and I’m not about to give him a price for it.”

Jess considers your words for a moment. She seems to be thinking her words carefully and, for the first time, she looks slightly personally offended by your insults towards his brother in law. “Well, I can't tell you much about his _dick_ ,” she says, obviously trying to crack a joke to take some of the tension off the conversation, “but Dean is so much more than that. He's a caretaker, he lives to serve others, their father made him that way. He will protect you. He pulled Sammy out of a fire when he was just 3 years old. Their mom died and their father, John… he was never right in the head after that. He talked about monsters and crazy stuff, dragged the kids along from state to state trying to hunt down something that wasn't there, a reason for Mary’s sudden death… Dean practically raised Sam.

“When he graduated high school, he joined the army to save up money so Sam wouldn't have to pay his future student loans all by himself, Dean planned ahead of time, you see? Because he lives for others rather than for himself. The army gave him an college scholarship in exchange, if he studied something useful for them, and then money while he served time. That was really hard for him, he never said much about his time in the military, he mostly kept us in the dark while he served, his letters were always vague, but we could tell he didn’t like the soldier life.

“When he came back, he had a terrible case of PTSD. Still does. Every 4th of July Sam drives away with him, somewhere into the mountains, and he tells me Dean takes sleeping pills to sleep through it, the fireworks freak him out too much. Then Bobby -have you heard of Bobby? he's like a father to them- he got sick last year. Cancer. He was in pretty rough condition, big tumour he had, Sam and Dean were beyond themselves with worry. It wasn’t terminal but he needed a lot of care and a pretty risky surgery… The treatments and everything, it was expensive as hell. His health insurance wouldn't cover for a lot of it and Sam and I- we helped but it wasn't enough…”

Jess takes a deep breath. The guilt in her features is obvious. You look away from her, but continued to listen carefully.

“So, Dean enlisted in the Omega breeding program, got in right away because of his time in the army, they give them priority as candidates. They pay the Alphas a pretty sum of money when they get selected, you know? He used it all to pay for Bobby’s medical bills. Thankfully, Bobby pulled through. I don't know what the boys would have done if he didn't. I've given you this whole speech and maybe it means nothing to you, and you're right, maybe he isn't very well spoken and he doesn't know much about fancy stuff or whatever it is you like in a guy… but he is a nice guy. He's a _good person_. I can't tell you to go and fall in love with him… but please don't hate him. This isn't easy for him either. I know he will be gentle with you and he will care for you and your future pup. You only need to have one and the government will leave you alone.”

A thick silence settles between the two of you. You feel a heavy weight pressing down on your chest; a big pile of guilt and regret. You think back on all the things you said to Dean the past few days and all the other ways you insulted him in your mind, and for the first time you feel terrible for all of it. Dean, after all, is as stuck in a situation he hates as you are. And not only that, but you have treated him like trash since the first time you met while he tried to be friendly with you all along. It was all pretend, you'd told yourself, tricks so you would lower your guard and then he would get what he wanted from you easily… but what if you'd been wrong all along? What if Dean really was just a rarely nice Alpha?

“Oh, God,” you groan, cringing with embarrassment and regret. You've been the bad guy of the story all along, not Dean. Sure, you'd had your reasons, but you hadn't even given Dean the tiniest chance, the benefit of the doubt, a moment to explain his own motives, before you had set your judgment in stone. “I think I made a mistake… I said- I said all kinds of things to him.”

Jess shifts in her sit uncomfortably and moves her eggs from side to side with her fork. “I know,” she admits after a moment. You look up, afraid for a moment that you'll find hatred in her eyes; for some reason, you don't want to antagonize her. But there's just a bit of awkwardness in the pair of eyes she meets and a small sympathetic smile. “Sam and Dean… they talk a lot, they're really close. And Sam tells me everything, so… yeah, I know.”

You look away. You're ashamed of yourself and the guilt burns hot in your body along with your persistent heat.

“I- I didn't know- I thought-” you bite your lower lip. There's no excuse. You did the same thing you hated Alphas doing; you set Dean inside the expectations of stereotypes and you never gave him the chance to show he could be anything else but a dominant, insensitive Alpha. “He must hate me.”

“No, he doesn't. He understands. He… I guess he hoped you could be friends,” Jess shrugs. “It isn't too late for that, if you give him a chance.”

 _Friends._ You don't have to be true mates, you don't have to be his enslaved Omega, you don't have to surrender everything and just be a mother to his pups… You could be friends with this guy, raise one kid together and move on with your life, get another job as a doctor in a new hospital. It's as good an offer as you're going to get and maybe it isn't too late for that. And maybe it’s still your heat messing with your head or maybe it’s because your dislike for Dean has somewhat lessened after everything Jess told you, but it wouldn’t be the worst thing to have him in your bed during your heat, he’s a fine looking man. You bet he’s the kind of man who knows exactly what to do in bed, with those big hands of his and his strong looking legs...

“Thanks, Jess… for everything,” you mutter shyly, looking down at you food as you try to get a grip of your thoughts. You wish you could say more; _thank you for not judging me, thank you for telling me the truth, thank you for taking care of me, thank you for not hating me despite all the trouble I caused_ … but you settle just for the short version instead.

“It's okay. You're part of our pack now and we Winchesters take care of each other.”

Later that morning, another wave of pleasure nearly overpowers you, painting white spots in your vision as you stumble towards the bed. Jess cuffs you to the bed again, just in case, and you spend the rest of the afternoon trying to sleep through the heat. You are able to eat dinner that night and even watch almost an entire movie with Jess before bed; it’s a rerun of Wall-e, which apparently you both love, but you end up pretending to go to bed half an hour before the movies ends when you begin to feel your panties wetting again as thoughts of Dean cross your mind when you get distracted. You feel slightly awkward feeling aroused while watching a kid’s movies, so you call it quits for the night and try to sleep again instead.

On the fifth day, there’s no need to be cuffed to the bed. You feel almost normal again, though you know very well it’s still not safe for you to see Dean just yet, or any other alpha for that matter. You feel like a constantly aroused 15 years old boy who’s just discovered porn, you can’t get the dirty thoughts out of your mind for too long. Jess announces she’s leaving after lunch now that you can be trusted alone -they’ve a life of their own and Sam needs to get back to work-, but she’s nice enough to get groceries for you to make dinner. You share an awkward hug before she leaves and she promises you’ll see each other again pretty soon, and then you’ll get to meet Sam too. You’re slightly sorry to see her ago and without her comforting presence, you begin to feel nervous again at the prospect of seen Dean and the uncertainty of the future and everything the awaits you once your heat is over and you can move on from this place. That night, sleep doesn’t come easy. You lay in bed looking at the darkness that surrounds you wondering what’s going to happen now, what you’re going to do when you see Dean. Should you apologise for the way you’ve been acting? Can you really even do that? You’ve always been rather proud, apologising has never been an easy task for you. Could you just pretend to start all over again with him, would he be okay with that? You find yourself wondering what Dean’s like. Is he fun? Is he stupid? Is he interesting? _At least he’s… kind_ , you admit to yourself. A kind Alpha is a good enough Alpha, you figure, you can work with that.

In the morning, you take a shower that makes you feel like you’re coming back from the dead. You rub soap all over your body and get the smell of your heat off your skin. You wash your hair, you wash your private parts which have stopped throbbing. You stand under the rain for a while, enjoying the peace your body’s finally reached. You try not to think that the next time you feel like you have the past few days, Dean’s probably going to be joining you in your bed. Then you definitely don’t think how he’d look naked because your heat’s over and you shouldn’t be thinking about him that way…

When you get out of the room with your bag hanging from your shoulder, there’s Dean sitting on the hood of his car, sipping coffee. You watch him for a moment as he texts someone with his phone and take a deep breath to muster the courage to go to him. When he picks up your scent, he turns around to look at you and offers you a careful but sincere smile. That’s when you see the nasty bruises in the side of his face, which is slightly swollen; green, yellow, violet, you name it, it’s a freaking rainbow painted in his otherwise perfect skin.

“Hey there, how-”

“Holy shit, what happened to you?”

The doctor in you kicks in. You break the small distance between you with a small run and drop your bag at your feet as you lean closer to examine his face, grabbing his chin and forcing him to face the other way so you can get a better look. Dean gulps, surprised at your proximity and the fact that you’re talking to him like a normal person.

Your eyes scan his face quickly; it’s a little swollen, but his bruises and black eye seem to be healing; whatever happened to him, it was probably a couple of days ago. You hiss in sympathy when you see the cut in the edge of his hairline. It’s small but you figure you would have stitched him had you been able to be with him whenever he got injured.

“It’s healing well,” you tell him with your monotonous doctor voice. “Guess you disinfected it well, but you should have got stitches.” You let his face go and take a couple of steps back, realising you’re standing way too close to him. He turns his face back around, looking at your with wide eyes. You’ve never seen him speechless before… you rather like it. “Was it another Alpha? Why didn’t you go to the hospital?”

Dean shrugs. “It’s no big deal, I’ve had worse,” he replies but the truth is he didn’t want to leave you, not even knowing Jess was looking after you while Sam helped him guard your door. _He_ was responsible for you, after all, it wouldn’t have been right to leave you behind. “Should have seen the other guy,” he brags to deflect the subject.

You roll your eyes at him and cross your arms over your chest. “Alphas…” you huff under your breath.

At that, Dean eyes you warily, as if trying to figure out whether you’re going to yell at him today or not. You see his shoulders tensing, his posture changing, becoming smaller, probably so that you won’t feel threatened by him, and you realise he might have taken that as an insult while you were just joking around.

“So, err… What are our plans now? Where are we heading to?” you ask him, hoping he’ll take the hint and realise you’re not looking for a fight, not today. You’re not sure what’s going to happen next but, perhaps, this time around you can be more cooperative and things won’t have to be a total nightmare for the both of you.

Once more, he looks surprised with your behaviour. “Well… I thought we could visit Bobby for a bit. He’s a friend of the family. He, hmm… He was sick not too long ago, kinda serious, and he’s got a doctor's appointment scheduled, just a check up. I know he hates doctors so I just wanna make sure he doesn’t miss his appointment… if that's okay with you, [Y/N].”

You nod a couple of times and an awkward silence lingers between the two of you. Dean’s looking at you suspiciously as he tries to figure out why you’re being so cooperative. Before he has a chance to ask you and you’re forced to throw Jess under the bus, you pick up your bag and walk around the car to get to your seat.

“Let’s hope he doesn’t hate _me_ ,” you mumble under your breath. The prospect of meeting yet another member of his family makes you slightly nervous, but it’s either that or going home. Where that is, you’re not sure anymore since you haven’t discussed where you’re going to live. A part of you doesn’t care much about that, you’re not exactly eager to go back to your place and show your face there where everyone knows you’re a runaway Omega that got caught by her Alpha. You’re a joke, an embarrassment. You’d rather stay in the road a little longer than face all the people you left behind. “Alright, then. Where does Bobby live?”

Dean opens the door on his side and climbs into the car. “Sioux Falls,” he tells you. He continues to observe you with caution as you get in and throw your bag in the backseat. “What’s up with you?” he asks without even trying to hide the suspicion in his voice. “Why are you being so…”

“Normal?” you offer when he remains silent trying to find the write words. He nods. You look down at your hands and reply, rather softly, “you kept your promise… you didn’t mate me. And, hmm,” you meet his eyes and point at the side of his face, “you even protected me. Maybe… maybe you’re not so bad after all.”

He huffs a laugh. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, kiddo,” he smirks cockily to hide a smile of true happiness at hearing that coming from you, just as he turns the key and the car rumbles back to life. A second later, you're on the road again. The fact that you’ve stopped looking at him with disgust goes a long way for him.

“Yeah, well, don’t get cocky, Alpha, you’ve still got a lot to prove,” you tease him, trying to sound tough because it doesn’t feel right just yet to lower all your defenses against him. You still don’t really know him, he might still be an asshole secretly, or impossible to live with, but for now… for now you’ll give him the benefit of the doubt at least. He deserves as much, you think, since he’s kept all his promises to you so far and has never hurt you, not even when he caught you trying to run away from him.

He snorts. “Alright, ma’am. If you’re hungry, grab my bag, on the backseat. Jess made lemon cakes before she left, there’s still some on a tupper.” You frown, trying to remember when she could have possibly baked because you had no recollection of even smelling anything close to cake. Then again, you could barely remember anything. “Sorry I had to leave you with her, but, hmm, me being in there with you... it wouldn’t have been wise…” It is left unsaid that he wouldn't have been able to resist the urge to breed you, but you know that's the implication.

“It's okay, I understand. I’d forgotten how it felt, without the suppressants.”

“Is it very different?”

You nod. “The suppressants aren't just birth control… Then literally suppress most of the heat, you barely feel anything. I'd forgotten how delirious it felt. You get lost in the urge to breed, to need feel someone there with you, your Alpha…”

Dean shifts uncomfortably in his seat, feeling the heat rising from his belly to the back of his neck and making its way to his cheeks and ears. _Time to change the subject_ , he thinks, because the last thing he wants now, during your first real and civilised conversation, is to get aroused and make you uncomfortable with the scent he’d soon be emanating. “Well, you’ll be able to take them after we, hmm, you know. Hey, wanna pick the music now that we’re on speaking terms?” he offers, pushing the box with cassettes from under the seat.

“Oh, God, yes, if you make me listen to AC/DC one more time…” you mumble as you push the box into your lap and start to going through the titles.

“You don’t like AC/DC?” Dean asks rather alarmed.

You can’t help chuckling at his horrified face. “Why? Is that a deal breaker for you?”

“Maybe,” he nods.

You roll your eyes at him. “I do like it, I just don’t wanna hear it _every_ single day. Oh, good, Queen, nice. What record is this?”

“It’s a mix of my favorite songs.”

Another One Bites The Dust starts and you sit back on the leather, closing your eyes as you bathe on the sunlight of the early morning. The now familiar roar and vibrations of the car almost send you back to sleep and you’ve got to admit now that you don’t hate anything and everything related to Dean Winchester, that this is a pretty cool, comfortable car. At least it’s got a lot of leg space.

“So?” Dean asks after a couple of songs, in the middle of A kind of magic . “Did I pick the right songs?”

You hold a finger up so shut him up. “Dean, if you want this to work, never speak over Freddie again.”

Dean laughs and it rumbles deep on his chest. You’re not sure why but it makes you open your eyes and you sneak a glance in his direction. He’s looking straight ahead at the road, smiling from ear to ear as his laughter dies out. He looks… _happy_. And, honestly, more handsome than ever (his bruised side is conveniently out of sight). You close your eyes again, resisting a stupid urge to smile too because fuck your dream of finding true love and whatever fairytale you’d been trying to achieve, but at least you got a really fucking handsome mate delivered to you on a silver platter.

You get to Bobby’s pretty later that same evening. At first you think Dean must be lost or in need of a mechanic when he pulls into what looks like a car cemetery, but there behind the labyrinth of garbage is a slightly beaten two story house. A man sits on the porch drinking beer and he waves at them as Dean brings the car to a stop. He gets his bag from the backseat and gets out of the car, not bothering to lock the car, walking up the stairs of the porch like he owns the place, stopping to shake hands with the other man and pat his shoulder. You follow him slowly, taking your time shyly, trying to make yourself invisible. You wonder if Dean’s told this Bobby about you too, about all the awful things you said to him. With that and the knowledge that he hates doctors, you’re ready to bet you’re off to a wrong start with this guy. But when you finally catch up with the man, he gives you a slightly awkward but nonetheless welcoming smile.

“You must be [Y/N], I’m Bobby,” he says, offering his hand out to you. You nod and shake it. “Welcome. Come on in, you must be tired from the long drive. Want a beer? Dinner’s ready too.”

“Yes, thank you,” you reply, smiling back at him. He’s an Alpha too but mated, tamed, you can smell something calm and patient in him despite his uninviting appearance. Maybe he’s like Dean too; rough on the outside, but apparently softer in the inside. Despite his scent, there’s no trace of an Omega inside.

“You waited for us with dinner? Wow, that’s new,” Dean teases him as he walks into the house, throwing his bag by the couch in the living room and making himself at home in it.

“Well, we’ve got a lady in the house now,” Bobby comments, nodding at you once as he closes the door behind you and gestures you to come further in since you’ll still awkwardly standing on the foyer. “Gotta make a good impression, boy.”

Dean snorts. “Jess has done a number on you,” he mutters under his breath as he stands up and walks to the kitchen following the smell of food.

Dinner’s over rather quickly and silent, but it’s fine by you, you don’t feel like talking a lot. After all, now you’re going to be part of the family, you figure they’ll be plenty of time to get to know Bobby. Dean asks him about his appointment and Bobby rolls his eyes at him when the younger man insists to go with him in the morning. He resists but in the end Dean tells him he’s going to follow him with the car if he must, so in the following morning they leave together to the hospital. You stay back, knowing Bobby wouldn’t feel comfortable with you there since he looks nervous enough with the idea of Dean joining in. Before leaving, your Alpha gives you this worried look and you have to push him out the door while you swear to him you’re not going to try to run away again. With the two men gone, you walk around the house a little, giving yourself time to stop and observe the pictures framed in the wall of the stairs. There’s a picture of a way younger Bobby with a woman, in what looks like their wedding. There are two other pictures of her. You wonder where she is now, why there’s no trace of her scent here. You stash that question in a box in your mind full of things you’ve got to ask Dean eventually. There’s a picture of two boys fishing in a lake at the bottom of the stairs. That’s unmistakably a younger Dean, probably 10 years old at the time, grinning widely at the camera without a care in the world. A stupid thought occurs to you; you’d probably have really cute pups together, since you had also been a really cute kid in the past. Hopefully you’d have a boy and not a girl, since a girl would most likely grow to be an Omega and you don’t want that life for your pup. If you had a boy, in the other hand, the chances of him being an Omega were really low.

After debating with yourself for a little while, you decide to start making lunch. Af first you’d thought you didn’t want to wait for them with lunch ready in case it gave Dean the impression that you’re going to be this docile Omega that takes cares of all the chores in the house, including meal preparations, because if that’s what he thinks, then he’s in for a big disappointment… But then Bobby, an Alpha who didn’t even know you, had made dinner for you last night, so it was the least you could do for the man. Another point in favor of cooking was the hungry noises your belly was making. Your heat had left you feeling weak, you’d even lost some weight since you’d barely eating for days, and you needed the food to get your strength back.

When the two men arrive home, you are glad to see them in a good mood; _good news, then,_ you assume, but don’t ask; Bobby will say something if he wants to, or won’t if he doesn’t want to share with him. Bobby hurries upstairs to put away his folder with all his medical papers while Dean almost dances his way into the kitchen happily, stopping by the fridge to grab a beer.

“Making lunch so early?” he asks, leaning against the counter while you stir all the ingredients together so they won’t stick to the bottom.

“Yeah, I’m hungry. It’s like my body wants to make up for every lost meal during the heat.”

He chuckles under his breath, then stops to contemplate you for a moment. Scratching the back of his neck, he murmurs kind of awkwardly, “you don’t have to to cook for me, you know that, right?”

You fight back a satisfied smile; yeah, maybe he’s not a jerk after all. “I know,” you said, “but I wanted to. For Bobby, of course, not you,” you joke, pretending to throw him a nasty look.

He rolls his eyes, folding his arms over his chest. “Yeah, God forbids you accidentally satisfy for Alpha.”

“Amen to that,” you murmur. He hears it and laughs. A smile tugs at the corner of your lips and you fight it back. It’s beyond bizard how easy you can talk now that you’ve let your guard down a little. It was you apparently, after all, who had been making things hard, since Dean seems to be a really easy going guy. There’s no joke that will offend his Alpha pride, and no stupid sexist demands coming from him either.

“Play hard to get all you want… I kinda dig it,” he tells you, wiking an eye at you. “Want help with anything?”

“Nah, you’ll probably ruin it.”

He scoffs as he opens his beer using nothing but the edge of the counter. “I’ll have you know that I am a _very_ good cook. You’ll see, you’re gonna regret saying that.”

“Oh, really? What are you gonna do, punish me with yummy food?” you ask him, raising an eyebrow.

Dean considers it for a moment. “Yeah, you’re right, probably not my biggest threat.”

You smile and look down at the pot just as Bobby comes in. He glances back and forth between the two of you, frowning with a little confusion. He sees the happy, relaxed expression in Dean’s face as he observes you and can’t help thinking there’s some really unusual spark in his eyes. He doesn’t mention it, though, because he doesn’t want to damage whatever fragile peace the two of you have managed to reach… but he can’t help thinking maybe there’s hope for the two of you after all.

After lunch, Dean offers to help Bobby finish some repairs outside in the salvage yard. You sit on the chair out in the porch, enjoying the breeze of the lazy afternoon, watching the two men work on cars while you try to read.

You steal glances in Dean’s direction, watching him sweat and get dirty with oil, and you try to come to term with the fact that the man you’re seeing is your Alpha, your future mate, the one who will mark your neck and be a father to your pups. The future is now and you need to figure out your next move. At least now you know you have a say in it, your opinions will be heard and considered… so what do you want? Now that you can make decisions, you need to figure out what the hell you want to do with your life.

 _Now what?_ you ask yourself. You can’t stay here at Bobby’s forever, as much as you realise the old man likes to have you two around. Dean just wanted to come and check on him, and now that’s done, you two should hit the road soon, probably tomorrow. Where to, though? If you asked him to go home, to _your_ home, would he agree? You own a house in the outskirts of Portland, a modern and slightly fancy two story house with a nice basement and all, courtesy of the more than comfortable salary you used to make as a surgeon in one of the best hospitals of the State. You love that house, you really do, and you miss it but whenever you thought of coming back, you couldn't help cringing. There’s just no way you could go back to work in the hospital after the way you’d run away; even if the took you back, which you doubted, you didn’t want to face all the people you left behind, didn’t want to hear the gossip about you nor stand the embarrassment of knowing everyone knew about your private life, everyone knew you were being forced to fuck and mate Dean, who had managed to drag you back home. You’d never liked your co-workers very much but you’d put up with it because you loved the job. Your parents were back there too; your obnoxious mother and your jerk of a father, neither of whom you were too excited to see any time soon. You did miss your best friend, Josie, a sassy Alpha who had been by your side ever since you were ten years old and other boys at school would harass you because of your Omega scent. She’d hug you until her scent covered most of yours, you still remembered that and choked with emotion… But you couldn’t go back just because of her, she wouldn’t want that for you, not if it would grief you.

Maybe you could go to Dean’s home. You had no idea what it was like there, you only knew he was from Lawrence, Kansas, wherever that was. You could start over with a clean slate, meet new people, get another job at a new hospital. New mate, new house, new job. And if that didn’t work, you could always leave Dean after the pup was born and move elsewhere; there was no real need for you to remain together after mating. Hell, it wasn’t even that unusual for Alphas to abandon their Omegas after they completed their side of the deal with this Breeding program, although Dean didn’t strike you at the type of guy who would leave their pup. The way Jess had talked about him, you figured Dean would want to be a part of your pup’s life and care for him.

Of the two men, Bobby calls it quits on the cars first and heads inside the house to start working on dinner. You’re pleasantly surprised he doesn’t so much as asks you for help and when you offer, he tells you there’s no need, that you should rest since you’re still probably tired from your heat… which is true. So you remain on the porch, watching the sun go down behind the trees from time to time when you get distracted from your book. The day turns into night slowly, the air around you gets chilly. When Dean runs out of light, he finally puts his tools down, wipes his face with a dirty towel even though it doesn't help him get any cleaner, and heads towards the house. You put your book down and muster your courage to talk to him, readying yourself for your first real and important conversation with them. Just as he’s heading towards the door, you clear your throat.

“Hey, Dean, got a minute?” you ask him,trying to sound as casual as possible.

He throws the dirty towel over his shoulder and heads towards you, leaning against the rails of the deck in front of you. “Sure,” he replies, mimicking your tone but feeling suddenly a little nervous. “What’s up?”

“I’ve been thinking and… well, I think it’s about time we sit down and talk, don’t you think?”

He shifts in place, putting his hands away on his pockets so he won’t fidget nervously. Of course he’d been thinking that, since the very first day you two met, but you hadn’t exactly made it easy for you and now he just didn’t know how to talk to you, afraid to trigger you and cause a fight, offend you by mistake and have you yelling at him again.

Dean nods.

“So, we need to figure out where we’re going to live. You’ve got your place in Kansas, I’ve mine in Portland. Have you, hmm, given this any thought?”

He swallows and looks away. The sky is getting darker by the minute and he buys some time as he watches a group of ducks fly away. Of course he had. He’d been thinking about it ever since he’d read your file and seen you lived in Oregon. The possibility of having to move to Portland had been stuck on his head ever since. It would be selfish of him to discard the option right away but the truth was he didn’t want to move, not at all; he loved his hometown, the people in it, his simple life there. It gave him joy having his brother and sis in law close too, and he was excited to become an uncle and be in his nephew’s life regularly. It was pretty close to Bobby’s two, only 5 hours away. Portland, in the other hand, was two days away from his family if he drove 12 hours a day to get to see them. He wouldn’t be able to visit them every weekend even if he wanted to, unless he took a plane, which was expensive and terrifying. So, no, he didn’t want to move, but he wouldn’t force you to abandon your home either. “Can’t say I haven’t,” he admits, keeping his tone neutral. “But I’d like to hear what you’ve got in mind first.”

“Why?” Dean sighs, thinking of his words carefully. You exhale sharply, annoyed at the way he was been so mindful of what he said. “Dean, just- just tell me. Don’t be _afraid_ of me, okay?”

“Says the woman who literally ran away from me the first time you saw me. And then you punched me. A couple of times, if I remember correctly.”

You blush. “It’s not like that anymore,” you defend yourself.

“Still. Ladies first. I don’t wanna trigger you, kid. Whatever you want, you’ve got it, I don’t care.”

You pinch the bridge of your nose, a little exasperated. “That’s not gonna work. You can’t just go along with anything I say because you’re afraid of my response. _I_ asked for your opinion, so come on, tell me.”

Dean regards you for a moment, searching for anything that might tell him this is some kind of test, a test. Should he know what you want? Cause he’s got no friggin clue. “Honestly?” You nod. He sighs, defeated. “I’d like to stay in Lawrence. My brother’s having a baby soon and I’d really like to be around to help him out. I’d be closer to Bobby too. I’ve a small business. Nothing too impressive, but it’s my own,” he shrugs, kicking his shoes against the old wood of the deck absentmindedly. He knows his jobs isn’t interesting and he barely employes a handful of people, it’s nothing compared to the kind of work he knows you do, saving people with literally your hands, but a childish part of him is still proud to be his own boss and do something he likes for a living. “I could try moving if you wanna get back to Portland, but, well, you asked so, yeah, if it were just up to me, I’d rather stay in Lawrence.”

You nod a couple of times and set your book down next to you. “That wasn’t that hard, was it?” you tease him. “If we want this to work, we have to be able to talk to each other… And by the way, I agree with you. I’d like to give Lawrence a chance.”

The Alpha’s face is a mixture of surprise and hope when he looks up. “ _Really_?”

“Yes. I… I don’t think I want to go back home. I was thinking, if it’s okay with you, that I could sell my house and have my clothes shipped to yours.”

Dean nods a little too eagerly. “Sure, yeah.”

You chuckle at his enthusiasm. “Tell me about Lawrence. Your house, your neighbourhood, whatever you want.”

The Alpha picks up your book and sits next to you. “I really like it. It’s probably not as exciting as Portland, but there are some nice things to see, lakes you can go to fish in, food trucks with the best churros ever, nice little restaurants for date nights,” he winks an eye at you at that, and you roll your eyes at him, thinking how ridiculous the idea of you two going out for dinner sounds in your head. “Besides, there’s just… there’s this feeling of… of _community_ , you know?” he tells you, smiling to himself at the thought of his home. “I’ve lived there my entire life, I know every single neighbour in my street. I live in my parent’s old house. Got burned down when I was a kid, but my dad and I did a lot of repairs ever since. It’s nice.” You nod, deciding not to mention the fact that you knew not only that the house had burned down but that his mom had died in the process. “Bet it’s nothing like yours, with what the salary you had -yeah, it was on your file-, but I promise, it’s nice. If you don’t like it, I guess we could move,” he offers but you can tell he really doesn’t like the idea, which makes you appreciate the gesture even more. “I was thinking of getting rid of some of the furniture when we get back. There’s some old stuff and I’ve always wanted to redecorate but I’ve terrible taste and… I don’t know, I just never got around to do it. Now you’re moving in, it’s the perfect time to do it, I guess, so you can choose some of furniture and make it your home too, you know? So it’s got a little bit of you in it.”

You blink a couple of times, surprised. “You’d really do that for me?” you ask in disbelief.

He huffs a laugh like it’s obvious. “Well, yeah. You’re not a _guest_. It’s your house too, you should have a say in it.”

You narrow your eyes at him. “I don’t believe that, you’re not _that_ nice,” you tease him.

“Is that a challenge?” he asks, smirking.

“Sure. I wanna see you getting rid of all your furniture when we get back.”

“Done,” he states stubbornly.

You laugh and shake your head. You take a deep breath and stand up, taking your book back from Dean in the process. “I guess I’m moving to Lawrence, then.”

That night, you finally call your best friend, the one and only person in the entire world you could talk to. You’re a little hesitant to call at first, after going months without sharing a word between each other. You hadn’t said goodbye when you ran away and you didn’t call her either because you were afraid Dean might use her to track you down. You expected her to be angry with you for the way you left her behind, and indeed she gave you an earful when she recognised your voice on the phone, but after minutes of scolding you she took a deep breath and told you how much she’d missed you. You told her everything then; about running away, about being caught by then, how you two had been off to a terrible start but were beginning to get along slowly… and then you told her you were moving to Lawrence.

“ _Lawrence_? What the hell’s on Lawrence? Where even is that?”

Josie tried to dissuade you but it wasn’t hard to convince her it was the best for you; she knew you wouldn’t be going with Dean if you didn’t truly think it was the best thing for yourself and even though she wanted you by her side just as much as you wanted her there with you too, she respected your decision. You didn’t even need to ask her to pack and send your stuff, she offered before you ever got a chance to do it. There wasn’t much left that you wanted, anyway, just your clothes, a small photo album, some books, important papers, your snowglobes collection and old VHS movies. You’d hire someone to sell the house and the furniture, and then you’d add that money to your savings account to make up for the money you’d spent while in your little adventure travelling across the country to run away from Dean.

With that taken care of, you and Dean said your goodbyes to Bobby, promised to visit soon and headed South to Kansas.

“You’re gonna like it, I promise. I’ll make it work,” Dean tells you out of the blue on the way, eyes never leaving the road. He sounds so serious, meaning every word in the vow he just took, and it makes you slightly uncomfortable how fast he’s taken you under his wing, how much he means it when he promises to make you happy, although at the same time it’s comforting. You believe him, you decide, you believe that he will try.

“Don’t talk over Freddie,” you reply, because The Show Must Go On is playing and you love it, but also because suddenly you’re lost for words and you don’t understand the intensity of his feelings. Is that part of being an Alpha, being so protective of those under your care? You thought it was the other way around, you thought Omegas were supposed to make their Alphas happy. Maybe it’s just a Dean thing, like Jess had told you, a part of his need to protect his family.

 _His family,_ you realise, swallowing the lump in your throat, _he thinks I’m his family now._

It’s Saturday afternoon when Dean drives Baby into Lawrence, Kansas. He’s been right; compared to Portland, Lawrence was small and less noisy. You’re not going to miss traffic at least, because even though the streets are narrower, the amount of cars is considerably smaller too. They pass a fair in a park, Dean’s favourite churros stand, a hospital you can’t help checking out, and then he’s driving into an even quieter neighbourhood. Children are playing in the streets unsupervised, riding their bicycles and playing soccer, getting out of the way as the Alpha slowly passes by. When Dean finally pulls over and announces you’re home, you take a moment to contemplate the house. You had imagined something darker, you realise feeling stupid, as if Dean hadn’t mentioned that he’d worked on the house after the fire when he was a kid. You don’t know why but you had imagined it with burned walls, looking sad and about to crumble. This house was nothing like that; it looked rather big and welcoming, with more than enough space for the two of you to settle down with a pup or two. You could just imagine it, your pup playing with their friends on the front yard full of flowers while you watched them from inside; that house had some big windows, must have a lot of natural sunlight, you think rather pleased.

“That’s… actually really nice,” you admit under your breath and Dean walks around the car to get your bags from the trunk.

When a short, chubby black woman comes out of the front door, you wonder for a moment if you’ve been looking at the wrong house all along but then Dean’s marching towards her, the two of them smiling at each other.

“Oh, boy, it’s good to have you back!” she greets him, hugging him even though he can’t hug her back, his hands busy with their bags.

“Hey, Missouri. It’s good to be back,” he replies.

The woman peaks from behind Dean at you and frowns, resting her hands on her hips while she gives you a rather disapproving look. “Is this the girl that’s been giving you trouble, Dean?”

You gulp, blushing hard and standing awkwardly close behind Dean, as if you could hide behind him.

He chuckles and shakes his head, looking back at you with a smile. “Give her a break, she had a hard couple of days,” he tells Missouri as he walks inside the house with you hot on his tale. “She got her heat like four three days ago.”

The woman’s face changes. She looks surprised, then worried, turning around to observe you, searching from something on your neck… a mating bite, you guess. “You didn’t-?”

“No, I didn’t,” Dean cuts her quickly, blushing himself as he puts his bags down by the door. “Sammy and Jess were there to help.”

“Isn’t she looking lovely?” Missouri comments, smiling at the mention of Jessica. Apparently, everyone’s a fan of her. “That pup’s growing like a weed. I bet she’s not going to get to 9 months before that boy decides to come out.”

“I know, Sammy said the doctor warned him they might have to pop the baby earlier, it’s getting too big. Trust my brother to have a monster baby,” Dean laughs. You notice how he lights up every time the subject of his nephew comes out. For a tough looking guy, he can go on and on about a baby he’s not even met yet.

As Dean and Missouri chat, you quietly move away to explore the house. It’s got more big windows, which you really like, and it’s spacious. The stairs are right in front of the front door. You ignore those and continue to your right; there’s the living room, which really doesn’t have that much furniture to begin with. In the middle of the room, there’s an L shaped sofa which calls to you. _Not leather, thank God,_ you beam. The sofa seems to be the only thing in the room that looks remotely new, apart from the TV, which is sitting on a bench that looks ancient. The coffee table, the desk, the chair and the shelf units also look like they’ve been there since Dean was a kid. They’re not awful, but they are rather outdated and he was right thinking you might want to replace them. You are surprised to see some classic titles on the shelves, like Moby-Dick, the Odyssey and the Iliad, some of Vonnegut’s books and also Bradbury’s. You stop in front of a picture of a very beautiful, blond woman, which you assume is his mom, and a tiny and also very blond Dean with a funny hair cut. You smile back at them for a moment, running your fingertips over the glass. Next to that picture, there’s another of of the same woman and a man with dark hair standing outside this same house; his face, you assume by the resemblance.

You go back to the other two just in time to say goodbye to Missouri while Dean thanks her for taking care of the house in his absence. She gives you one last hard look, a kind of maternal warning, _don’t mess with my boy_ , but then her expression softens and she winks at you once before saying goodnight, leaving you feeling rather puzzled.

Dean goes into the kitchen at you follow him, continuing your exploration. The kitchen’s big, with a lot of counter space. The dining table is square and rather small, with a chair in each side. Apart from that, Dean hasn’t bothered adding any other furniture in the room. It doesn’t bother you though, you hate houses that are crammed with furniture, they begin to feel more intrusive than helpful when you have to walk around avoiding them.

“There’s not much in the fridge, we’re gonna have to go out for supplies,” Dean says with his head on the fridge. “Wanna settle in first? I’ll show you upstairs.”

There are three rooms on the second floor; two of them are bedrooms and Dean had no idea what to do with the third one so for the moment he just uses it as storage, even though he’s got plenty of room in the garage and really not that many things to store to begin with. He offers you the master bedroom but since all of his stuff is already there, you tell them you’ll take the guest room instead. You close the door of the room for a moment and put your duffle bag over the bed. You look around for a moment, getting familiar with your new bedroom. Someday, you’ll have to share your bed with Dean if for only a couple of days, when you heat comes, but for now this is it, this is _your_ bed in _your_ new home. You take a deep breath and sit on the edge of your bed, looking out the window to see children playing outside on the street. You hear their laughter through the window, some dog barking in the distance. A feeling of stillness surrounds you and you realise you feel… _safe_. Calm. It’s not like the house you had in Portland but it’s not a prison either. And who knows, maybe soon it’ll feel like home.

Dean and you hit the supermarket and walk the aisles together to get familiar with the things each other likes and dislikes. No blue cheese for you since you’re allergic to penicillin. Dean likes peanuts and everything and anything with it; cookies, peanut butter, roasted and salted peanuts, you name it. You choose lactose free milk because the regular one makes your belly hurt. Dean picks up pie in the way and you have to stop him from getting more than necessary. It ends up being a long trip to the supermarket, but slowly you begin to get to know one another.

The following day, by the time you’re up, the Alpha’s gone. It doesn’t take long to find him, though; when you go downstairs to grab breakfast, which Dean left for you -pancakes!-, from the window in the kitchen you suddenly see him up in the roof of the neighbours from across the street, apparently working to fix it. He works the entire morning on it and you can’t help throwing curious glaces his way from time to time. It turns out it’s Missouri’s house and she invites the two of you over for lunch. Feeling rather intimidated by her, you decline saying you need to spend time researching possible job opportunities in clinics or hospitals. It’s rather nice to have the house for yourself as you settle in the desk in the living room with your computer, Erik Satie playing in the background to ease your nerves. You send applications like crazy and cross your fingers, hoping for the best. It’s time for dinner by the time Dean returns, stinking of sweat and covered in dust. He makes himself a sandwich, showers and heads straight to bed after saying good night; he looks _crushed_.

As it turns out, Dean is a busy and popular guy. He leaves early to work on his mechanic shop and when he’s back home, it’s not unusual to catch him chatting with his neighbours. A random woman shows up one morning while he’s out and leaves you a casserole to thank him for some favour he did her a while ago. Some kids stop to greet him when they see him walk by. “Hi, Mr Winchester!” they yell at him, the girls giggling at the sight of him. A girl in her early twenties downright makes eyes at him when she walks by the house and sees him unpacking bag from the Impala, which makes you roll your eyes all the way back into your skull because, yeah, okay, he’s hot, but you’re _right there_ , you, his mate, she could have some respect, even if there’s nothing real between the two of you. In the middle of the week, he goes to the next door neighbour’ to help her paint her baby’s nursery room. She’s expecting pretty soon and her husband’s just broke his leg, so Dean’s helping her out. When you go to ask him if he wants dinner, she lets you in and the two of you somehow end up watching Dean paint the room with insane concentration. Dean is sweaty, his tongue sticking out between his lips as he paints over the border of the window, making sure the brush doesn’t touch the wood. He bends over to get more paint and the two Omegas look down at his ass.

“Isn’t he a sight for sore eyes?” the other Omega whispers, winking at you, then instantly blushes. You snort. “Sorry, the hormones are making me a little crazy. But you _are_ one lucky Omega, Dean’s a catch.”

You start to think maybe he is. At least he makes a fantastic, caring neighbour and a pleasant roommate; even though he’s busy and he goes around helping and talking to everyone he possibly can, Dean still finds time to come back and have dinner with you, which he cooks himself most of the time. And he was right, you must admit, he’s a damn fine cook. You even catch a movie on Friday night together, even though Dean falls asleep before the end.

The first week of living together goes by so fast and so smoothly that it’s even weird to think that there was a time when you two didn’t speak to each other. Or rather, _you_ didn’t speak to him. There’s still some primitive reluctance to let all your guard down and accept that you and Dean could be very good friends if you opened up to him, but that doesn’t stop you from being nice to the guy. And he makes it so easy too, letting you go about doing your own thing during the day without any expectations from you other than washing your own dishes and helping out on the house chores, which are evenly divided between the two of you. He doesn’t even ask you to leave him dinner when he returns late from work, but you find yourself doing it anyway; after all, it’s really not that much of an effort to just throw some extra pasta from him while you’re making some for yourself.

It doesn’t take long for people who want to hire you to call you back. You nearly drop the phone out of excitement when you get an interview in the hospital you’d been aiming for and try to look tough and cool when they offer you a job as surgeon. They tell you there aren’t that many emergency surgeries to be performed, Lawrence is a pretty chill place, but you can also do clinic hours to fill in the blanks, which works just fine with you. It only adds to your happiness that when you tell Dean the news, he congratulates you and declares you should buy pie to celebrate. He makes hamburgers with even homemade bread and you two sit down together in front of the TV to share the meal.

“So, what do you want? In life?” you suddenly ask him. There’s still so much you don’t know about him, so many things you want to ask. “I mean, you have your shop. Is that what you wanna do, forever?”

He frowns over his burger, taken aback by the sudden, deep question. Crumbs roll down his chin and fall onto the sofa. You wrinkle your nose, faking to be disgusted by him. He takes a moment to chew and swallow, and then shrugs.

“I don’t have any plans, I’m gonna let my successful Omega surgeon take care of me and my pup,” he teases you. You bite your lip and elbow him on the ribs. You feel a stupid buzzing on the surface of your skin where you felt the warmth of his body against you.

“Come on, I’m serious. Didn’t you ever want... more?”

He hesitates for a moment and you wonder if you’re being an asshole about this. Maybe he’s happy keeping a low profile, content with his small business. Not everyone dreams big like you, you remember your mother telling you once. Of course, your parents wished _you_ were one of those people, they wish you’d just be a stay-at-home Omega like your mother.

“You really wanna know?” Dean asks without sign of being offended.

“Yeah.”

He tells you he’d like to expand the shop, he’d like to work on old cars to restore them. He tells you it pays very good money and the job is very enjoyable, but to do something like that he would need a lot of money to invest in everything he’d need to get the first job done and present his work in a show or something so he could make a name for himself and make contacts, people who would ask him to restore cars for him, and he doesn’t have that kind of money. He tells you he’d considered asking for a loan but that he’d chosen not to after all, because he’s done selling his soul for money.

“Well… I could give you the money.”

He laughs and you frown at him.

“Oh, you’re serious,” he says.

“Of course I am.”

He opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again, looking at you for a long moment. “Why the hell would you do that for me?”

You shrug. “I don’t know, it makes sense I guess. You’re the future father of my pup. I- I want you to be happy, I suppose,” you blush at this, advert your eyes. “You know, happy father, happy pup, I guess. I want you to succeed too. I got a pretty good offer on my house, I’ll have a lot of extra money soon, so… why not?”

Dean looks at you with his eyes wide with shock.

“Are you sure? I mean, it could take me years to pay you back, [Y/N],” he insists, almost as if trying to convince you against doing this.

“Well, like you said, this Omega breadwinner makes good money as a surgeon, so it’s fine by me.”

Before you know it, Dean’s pulled you into a hug. It lasts only for two seconds. Before you have time to even begin to think how amazing his Alpha scent is from up close, he’s pulling you again, blushing. You’re too stunned to say anything; it’s the first time the two of you touch like that.

“Sorry, was that weird?” he asks, scratching the back of his neck nervously, looking at you with fear, like you might yell at him any time now.

“No, it’s- it’s fine,” you stammer, then sip water just to have something to do with your hands.

Your house gets sold, you give part of that money to Dean, Josie sends you boxes with your stuff and you begin to work. Your schedule is crazy, but somehow you make it work and you find comfort in having a routine again. Dean insists the two of you have a least one meal a day together, so you continue to get to know each other. When you get the evening or night shift, he takes a break from work to return home and have lunch with you. In said days, you make lunch for the two of you, while he is in charge of dinner when that’s the meal you two share. It’s strange, but you kind of look forward to that part of the day, when you two sit together and tell each other all about your days; you tell him about the hospital, your co-workers (including two friendly Betas you hope to befriend), the gossips and the drama which are mostly a thing of the night shift, and he tells you about the neighbours who all want to meet you, his employees who are actually like family to him and the latest advances with the business. Dean suggests you two go out on your free days, so you get to know your new home a little bit; he finally takes you to have churros, which you admit are pretty good, then to a fair, a little bookstore he thinks you’d enjoy, the museums, which neither of you really enjoy so you end up leaving early and just walking around the neighbourhood.

Sam and Jess visit on the weekends, you even go out for dinner and a movie with them once. Sam’s nice, an oddly cheerful and cuddly Alpha who is even taller than Dean, to the point you have to literally look up to talk to him. Jess is just Jess, as friendly and likable as the first day you met her. Indeed, that baby bump of hers grows faster by the week and now she looks like she might pop any minute, even though it’s still soon for the baby to come out. You’re not mated to Dean yet but you already begin to feel like you’re part of the pack; they’re an easy going family, kind by nature and playful at heart. You know there’s no point fighting it, it’s obvious you are already getting attached to Sam and Jess. And why would you, anyway? Truth is you’ve always wanted this, a pack to belong to, people who would respect you and watch your back, so it’d be childish to reject it just because it was forced into you.

Everyday, another brick in the wall you’ve built around yourself to protect your heart and soul from Dean Winchester gets destroyed. Dean’s funny, easy to be around, quiet when you need him to be and talkative and approachable when you spend time together.

And he stays true to his promises, as you find out one day you come home from work and find the house nearly empty of furniture.

“Dean, what the hell did you do!?” you ask him when you come in and find the house empty, your voice echoing in the naked walls. You want to scold him but can’t help laughing.

“This is your fault!” he tells you, and you think back of that conversation back at Bobby’s weeks ago and face-palm yourself. “You challenged me, woman!” he laughs, glowing at how funny he thinks this all is.

“Where the hell are we gonna eat now?”

It becomes a bit of a habit to have dinner or lunch on the sofa in front of the TV (the only two things that Dean didn’t sell, apart from the beds), even though neither of you pay attention to it as you speak and share a meal together. Turns out the two of you are too busy or too lazy to buy new furniture, so the sofa becomes a sacred spot for the two of you.

It takes the both of you a while to open up about important stuff, the tales from your lives that you don’t normally tell because they hurt to much to think about, let alone speak about out loud to someone else. The first time you have a real conversation, it’s a stormy night. A pretty strong thunder wakes you up, makes you startle in your bed. You’ve always like lightnings but you’ve always hated thunders, they freak you out somehow, it’s a childish fear you were never able to completely defeat. You take the chance to go to the bathroom so you won’t have to later and when you walk past Dean’s room, you find his door open and see the Alpha busy on his computer, his jaw set in concentration.

You think back on Jess telling you about how Dean hates fireworks and you wonder if he hates thunders too. You figure he does when the two of you jump at the sound of another one.

“Hey, Dean…”

He jumps, frightened, a hand coming to rest in his chest. “Jesus. [Y/N], you scared the shit out of me.”

“Sorry. You want some company in there?” you offer. Dean looks down, jaw set, and shakes his head no, the stubborn Alpha. “Well, I do,” you tell him and walk into the room, pushing him a little so he moves to the side and you take a seat on the bed next to him.

He refuses to look at you and quickly moves the mouse to close the tabs on Google Chrome, but you see he was looking at relaxation breathing exercises. Another thunder rumbles, making the windows shake, and the Alpha visibly flinches. You take pity on him and find the courage to place your hand in his. It’s bigger, calloused, and warm. He holds his breath at the touch but doesn’t pull away, and soon enough you’re rubbing circles with your thumb over his skin.

“She told you, didn’t she? Jess, she told you about me,” he speaks so softly you have to concentrate to hear him. “That’s what you’ve been nice to me, isn’t it? You pity me.”

“I’m nice to you because you’re nice to me,” you reply, and really, it’s the truth. “You’re kind. And you’re… you’re my friend. Aren’t you?”

Dean thinks about it for a moment. He hears the strong wind outside and tries to focus on your voice inside, on the gentle touch of your hand on his. He nods in affirmation to your question.

“Well, then, let me help. You’re scared. I am too. I don’t like thunderstorms,” you admit.

It takes him a while but the says, “me neither.”

“Okay, so… so we could agree to sleep together on thunderstorms, how about that?” you offer him. You take the computer away from him and leave on the floor, then pull the covers over you. Your legs brush the skin of his and you both tense up for a moment.

“I… I can’t sleep.”

“Not all night?”

Dean shakes his head. He looks tired and older, and yet at the same time he looks like a child, afraid and alone, not knowing what to do.

“I guess we’ll have a slumber party then. We could use this time to talk.”

“About what?

“Maybe… maybe about why you’re afraid of thunders.”

He knows what you mean. You want to hear about his time in the army, you want to know what haunts his memories, but it’s clear pretty fast that Dean won’t talk about it. He lays down and stares at the ceiling, dark shadows under his eyes.

“Okay, not that. Well, something else then. Tell me, how come you don’t have a mate already? I mean, handsome guy like you, you’re not terribly awful either… How come there’s no special lady in your life?”

Finally, the somber expression in his face softens. A shy smile even pulls at the corner of his lips. “Are you hitting on me?” the teases you, though his tone is short of some its usual  playfulness.

“You wish.”

You laugh but stop when you see Dean’s face turning dead serious again. It’s almost a full minute before he speaks again.

“I almost did,” he says, his deep voice echoing in his chest. “I had someone, but, hmm… Then I joined the military and she… she didn’t wait for me to return.” He presses his lips together into a thin line while you observe him, unsure of what do say. Then, he shrugs. “I get it, life continued when I left, don’t blame her for that. And then, when I came back… between work and my- my, hmm, my PTSD…” he swallows, physically uncomfortable at the mention of the disorder, like it’s some sort of dark confession; _I’m damaged goods, watch out._ “I was busy,” he concludes.

You nod, lost in thought, feeling sorry for him. You get it, the busy part at least. The PTSD, not so much to be honest.

“And then Bobby got sick and you joined the program…” you continue for him.

“Wow, Jess really did tell you quite a bit, huh?” he grunts.

“Wish you’d had, Dean,” you tell them, rolling onto your side. He turns his head around to face you, his jaw set.

“I don’t want you to pity me.”

“I don’t pity you, but I do want to help you. I’m going to be your mate. We need to be able to talk about things, _anything_.”

“It’s not easy,” he whispers.

“I know,” you whisper back, your hand never leaving his.

Another thunder, another flinch coming from Dean, his eye twitches.

“It’s… going to take time.”

“We have time.”

He nods and turns his head back towards the ceiling. You close your eyes, relaxing in his presence even though he doesn’t. You open your eyes again when he speaks.

“I’m sorry, [Y/N]. I never told you, but I’m so sorry I had to go and find you,” Dean tells you, having turned his head around again to look at you. The devastated look in his eyes touches something in you. “They told me if I didn’t, I’d have to give the money back and I- I’d already spent it. Bobby was sick and I… I had to. And I’m so sorry.”

“Dean…” You’re breathless as you see tears gathering up in his eyes, his jaw trembling. You squeeze his hand reassuringly. “Dean, it’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. I promised myself I’d never hurt anyone again. [Y/N], I killed people. I killed people I didn’t even _know_. I promised myself, never again, Dean, never again!” the first tears run down the side of his face and land on the pillow, wetting it. “And then you come around and- and I’m so sorry, about all of this.”

Dean rolls on the bed, curling in on himself, ashamed of himself, of the things he’s done, of being a grown ass mass who is afraid of thunders, of crying like a child in front of you. When he pulls his hands away from yours, you respond by curling against him too, spooning him as close to you as possible.

“You haven’t hurt me. You won’t hurt me, I know it, Dean.”

“I will,” he sobs. “I have to. It’s my _job_. If I don’t mate you-”

“You will, but you won’t hurt me. I’ll let you. It’ll be alright, we’ll be alright.”

He shakes his head. “It won’t. This isn’t what I wanted. I wanted- I wanted-” he chokes on his words. _I wanted peace. I wanted a family. I wanted someone to love. I wanted to be loved. I wanted someone to choose me._ “This isn’t what I wanted,” he concludes.

You know exactly what he means and you’ve nothing to reply to that. Nothing you can say will make things better, you know that, because even if you two manage to find partners you really love after you’ve had the pup the government demanded of you, you’d never be able to mate with them. Once Dean bites your neck, you’ll be mated forever, a special bond made between the two of you that you’ll never be able to have with anyone else, no matter how much you love them. That connection will forever be forced between you and Dean, and forbidden for whoever else you truly love.

However troubled and rather sad the conversation leaves you feeling, something changes that night between the two of you. You started tackling more sensitives subjects when you talk instead of just discussing superficial everyday-matters. He tells you about his mom, about his dad. He tells you what little he remembers about her and how John lost it after her death. He tells you how he had to raise Sam himself, and that the only times he could act like a kid was when John left them at Bobby’s. You tell him that you come from a long line of maltreated Omegas, many of which had willingly accepted their position as such (like your mother), about your cruel dad, your ex boyfriends, the dozen of different types of assaults you endured from Alphas through your life, and that the only person you truly loved was your best friend Josie. He mentions little things about his time in the army, he educates you on his PTSD and reveals sometimes he's got mood swings, that he can get suddenly triggered by something and have a panic attack when two minutes ago maybe he was laughing at something. You learn what to do in such cases, you learn to be patient and hold his hand until he gets a little better. When there’s a thunderstorm, you sleep together in the same bed. Your scent helps him and he confesses he hopes once you're mated, your bond will help even more, since being close to once mate is supposed to bring peace to an Alpha.

An improvement is made in your relationship and the physical awkwardness between the two of you that usually made things a little tense disappears. You find yourself leaning against him more often, touching his arm without blushing like a schoolgirl and receiving kisses in the cheek or the forehead from him when he leaves for work in the morning or before going to bed. Sometimes it comes out so naturally that people stare, surprised at the open display of physical affection, and you’re sure they wonder if the two of you have finally fallen for each other...

You haven’t but you begin to fear Dean might. Perhaps he’s not _heads over heels_ _in love_ with you, but he definitely begins to get more… _possessive_ , as he clearly shows one night when you’re out together in a bar, enjoying a few beers after a long week at work. You are in your booth, checking you texts while Dean’s in the bathroom, when a guy approaches you. He’s a Beta, thank goodness, and a rather polite one. He’s talking so much, so fast, and honestly he’s being so funny and lovely, that you don’t get a chance to tell him you’re with someone before you catch Dean from the corner of your eye storming out the bar. Alarmed, you excuse yourself and jump to your feet, pushing people on your way to the door. You have to run after Dean on the street, calling his name as he’s about to turn on the corner. He doesn’t stop until you’re grabbing his arm and pulling him around.

“Hey! Hey, stop! Where the hell are you going?”

“Home.”

“Why? You were just gonna leave me alone back there?”

“ _Alone_ ?” he laughs bitterly. “Oh, honey, you weren’t _alone_ . I figured you could get a lift home from _him_ , if you came back at all tonight.” The venom in his words is obvious that you can’t do anything but stare back at him, utterly surprised. It’s the first time in a long time Dean’s even remotely unpleasant to you.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Come on, [Y/N], I _saw_ you.”

“What the hell do you think you saw, Dean?”

Dean avoids your eyes all the time and he continues to walk quickly towards the car, shaking his head in the process. You’re practically running to keep up with him. Suddenly he stops and you nearly run into him.

“You were all smiles with that guy, making eyes at him, and hey, I get it, I’m your appointed Alpha but I’m not your boyfriend or whatever. You only need me during your heat and in the meantime, you can do whatever you want, fuck or love whoever you want, I won’t stop you, I promised you as much, but that doesn’t mean I wanna stay and watch the show, okay?”

You remain frozen on the spot, watching him continue his way to the car alone. With your mouth slightly agape, you see Baby drive away, leaving you standing alone in the dark. You don’t understand how he can be so upset about it, it wasn’t like you’d even been flirting with the guy. Hell, you were just waiting for Dean to come back.

But by now you knew better than to chase after Dean when he was too upset, so instead you decided to go back to the bar. You spend the night drinking alone, turning down any guy that offered to buy you a drink, lost in thought, wondering if what you think happened really did happen. Is Dean… _in love_ with you?, you wonder. Or is he just possessive? Was he jealous because he thought you were willing to fuck someone else but not him, not even though a lot depended on it, actually? Did it hurt his pride that you didn’t initiate anything sexual with him? Surely he had to be used to women throwing themselves at him. Hell, if you’d met him in different circumstances, you would have enjoyed his attention at a bar and longed to get back home with him and jump his bones, but things were different now, sleeping with him meant a lot more, all the possible strings were attached in this situation.

The next day is kind of awkward. He goes to work particularly early without saying goodbye to you. That night, when he returns, you eye him with curiosity. He acts distant, frowning and looking moody but you know that’s his way of looking sad. In an attempt to restore peace, you ask him if he wants to watch a movie with you before going to bed and finally he softens, although he remains pretty quiet when the two of you usually talk a lot during movies (which drive Sam insane when you’re with him).

Robert Winchester is born during an scheduled a c-section, two weeks premature. He was getting too big, the doctor had told them. Dean and you go to the hospital to meet him and the new parents, and any concern, any possible negative feeling that might still linger in Dean, is lifted from his shoulders when his younger brother introduces them to his son. The Alpha reaches out to grab the pup right away and holds him with an expertise that takes you by surprise. He smiles down at the baby, looking down at him in adoration, whispering sweet promises to protect him, to teach him about cars, to buy him beer when his lame father won’t (Sam frowns at that), to love him forever. After that, Dean jumps to help his brother out with the baby any chance he gets, no matter how sudden the request might come, never minding that Dean worked the entire day and is exhausted,  so you end up seeing a lot of little Bobby in the weeks that come. The Alpha is crazy about his nephew even though he doesn’t really do much other than lay there and smile back to whoever gives him attention. Dean’s got no problem changing diapers, he does it like a pro, although he never fails to complain and whine about it constantly from the minute he starts to the moment he finally gets to throw out the nasty residues of the process and say mission accomplished. Whatever doubts remained in your mind regarding Dean’s capability of being a good father fade away and though the prospect of having a pup doesn’t exactly thrill you because you had never really been the type of woman who thought motherhood would complete you or something, at least now you’re sure you’re going to have a lot of support from your Alpha. Dean’s loving and patient and actually very sweet, walking around the house whispering songs into the baby’s ear, brushing their noses together as they scent each other.

You don’t only start thinking of having a pup and what it’d be like to be a mother, what you’d have to give up to rise to the challenge (for example, taking maternity leave would be a must and you weren’t looking forward to that at all), but the _making_ of the pup. You allow yourself to look at Dean, _really_ look at him, without shame or restrain, and fantasize about him. You haven’t had sex in months and the need is starting to burn you alive without the need of going through your heat. Sometimes you catch glimpses of his stomach when he wipes his hands or forehead with it and fuck the government and their impositions but damn, you wouldn’t mind sleeping with Dean at all. You wonder what he looks like naked, towering over you. You wonder if he’s the type of guy who likes to go down on women and looking at those soft lips of his, the way he licks them first sometimes before speaking, you pray to God, if there is one, that he is.  When you come home earlier from a shift at the hospital one night and you catch him jerking off, it makes everything worse. You don’t need to even see him to get aroused, just the sound of his muffled groans singing to you from the other side of the door of his bedroom is enough to have you dream about him that night.

Dean doesn’t seem that surprised when you bring up the subject one afternoon while you two are out shopping for groceries on the supermarket. In retrospective, it might have not been the best place to have that conversation, but you wanted the it to seem casual in an attempt to make it seem less important. He must have known your heat was coming too; if he hadn’t been keeping track of the days on the calendar, then he could surely start smelling it on you by now, your scent changing little by little every day, turning sweeter, calling to him. You realise he was just being patient, giving you time to bring it up on your own terms.

“So,” you clear your throat and and throw a package of your favorite cheese into the shopping cart, “I, hmm, asked for some days off at work. You know, with my heat coming soon.”

The Alpha merely tenses up for a moment, his grip on the cart tightening. He nods and waits for you to continue as his eyes scan the aisles, pretending to be distracted.

“I think it’s going to hit me sometime around Tuesday. I was thinking I should, you know, sleep with you. In your bed.” _And then we’ll get down to making a pup_ , you leave unsaid.

Dean takes a deep breath. The lines on the corner of his eyes seem more pronounced all of a sudden. He looks tired, a little gray under the cloudy sky of the afternoon. _This isn’t what I wanted_ , plays over and over again in your mind with his voice, like a broken record. It’s coming, the inevitable mating process, and this isn’t what he wants but it is what it is. Amazingly enough, you’ve made your peace with the situation more than he has. It could be worse, much, _much_ worse and you’ve learned to be thankful for the Alpha. As far as mates go, he makes a damn good one, even if you’re not in love with him.

“Okay,” he finally agrees. He sounds defeated and you don’t bring the subject up again.

The day before your heat strikes, Dean acts very weird. It’s not just that he’s quiet and visibly nervous, but he spends the entire day wrinkling his nose, sniffling and exhaling sharply whenever you’re around. It’s kind of funny to see but when you remember your scent is probably starting to arouse him already, your smugness dissolves on a pool of wetness between your legs. You like it, the thought of him getting hard for you, even before your heat. You can see he’s making a special effort to remain physically distant with you but, honestly, at this point you wouldn’t mind sleeping with him already.

Taking mercy on how anxious he seems and because you know he’s going to have to take care of the two of you during the following days, you cook dinner that night even though technically it’s his turn. You prepare the chicken tacos and put them down on the coffee table in the living room and climb into the sofa with two glasses of whiskey.

“Here, drink. Relax a little, Dean,” you tell him, holding out one of the glasses for him.

You take an impressive sip of whiskey yourself, making a face as the liquid burns its way through your body, and get up to play music on your computer.

“Are you trying to seduce me by getting me drunk?” he jokes, melting against the sofa with his plate of tacos on his lap.

You play press on a long playlist of Queen.

“Hmm, actually, if I remember correctly, it was _you_ who once said we should get drunk and then you’d give me a lap dance,” you reply, sitting cross-legged next to him again.

He grins, his lips hovering over his glass of whiskey. “Do you _want_ me to give you a lap dance? I don’t think The Show Must Go On is a very good song for that.”

“Are you kidding me? Yes, it is. It’s so dramatic.”

Dean snorts, then throws his head back and laughs. “You’re such a weirdo with Queen. You want our pup to be conceived to it? Should I put it on the background, playing on my phone?”

“Yeah, actually, I wouldn’t mind that.”

Dean runs a hand down his face, shaking his head as he tries not to laugh. “I was kidding!”

You shrug, grinning, and full your glass with more whiskey.

Dean sniffles again and rubs his nose.

“Sorry, I tried to cover the scent with perfume. It isn’t working, is it?”

“No, it’s not,” he mutters under his breath, shifting in his seat. You wonder, very inappropriately, if he’s hard for you. “How come you’re not nervous?” he suddenly asks before he bites on his taco. Then he continues talking with his mouth full of food, the gentleman. “I mean, a couple of months ago I was the one that had to talk you into this.”

You shrug, downing more whiskey than tacos. You’re in a very _fuck-it-all_ kind of mood, your head moving from side to side to the rhythm of the background music. “I guess you did a good job. Doesn’t hurt that you’re handsome too.”

The Alpha lifts an eyebrow and chuckles. “Well, thank you. You’re not that bad yourself.”

You smile at each other. There's something about him, something about how he suddenly feels happy, really happy, or the way he's looking at you, like there's no else he'd rather be with right now, drinking and hanging out with, that makes you feel both good, safe and wanted, but also uneasy, because he shouldn't be looking at you like he's got actual feelings for you that go beyond a strong friendship, so you down another shot of whiskey just to drown your mixed feelings; no need to think about how his eyes seem to shine when he stares like that, not when tomorrow's the big day, the breeding day.

About an hour and several cups of whiskey later, you’re standing on the sofa, singing Elvis songs to the top of your lungs. Dean tries to shut you up (even though he’s laughing at you all the time), saying you’ll wake the neighbours and that even though you have days off, it’s still a week day for the rest of the planet. You giggle and sit back down, pressing your body against his. His Alpha scent is masculine and strong. You’ve always been aware of it, Dean smells good, but now you’re so close to your heat, almost there, and your inhibitions are low with the alcohol you’ve had, his scent is starting to be a siren call for you. You breathe it in slowly and Dean tenses up.

“God, you smell good, Dean,” you mumble, dragging your words unattractively. Still, the way you lean in closer to his throat has Dean holding his breath and alert.

“Okay, I think it’s time I put you to bed,” he declares, nearly jumping off the couch and away from you when he sees you closing your eyes and leaning even closer to breathe in his scent again. “Come on, little Omega, to bed.”

You pout like an idiot but don’t resists when he takes your glass from your hand. “Let me finish the song!”

“Nope, come on, I don’t want you getting your heat in the freaking living room. Let’s go.”

Dean leans in and picks you up in his arms like you weight nothing more than baby Bobby does. You giggle and rest your head on his shoulder as he carries you up the stairs, bridal style. As you close your eyes you think you like the fact that he’s as strong as he looks. The idea of Dean being able to manhandle you with little to no effort turns you on and it shows in your scent. He curses under his breath as the air around you gets sweeter by the minute and tries to hold his breath to avoid getting a boner while you’re still on his arms. Once in his bedroom, he gently puts you down, takes your shoes off and stares down at you, wondering if he should try to undress you or not. You roll to your side and lazily undo the button of your jeans, then wiggle out of them, kicking them off. Dean tries not to stare, but his eyes keep redirecting themselves in your direction, catching sight of your underwear, the curve of your ass, the back of your thighs, before you blindly feel for the covers and push them over you.

He takes a few calming breaths and curses quietly over and over again as he tries to will his erection down before he takes his clothes off until he’s wearing nothing but his underwear, and climbs into bed with you, making sure to stay as close to the edge of the bed and as far from you as possible. While you seem to fall asleep rather quickly, he stays up for some time, listening to the way you breath evenly, reading himself for what’s about to come, for what he’s going to do to you tomorrow.

The following morning, he wakes up with a start. Your back is pressed against his chest, his arm lazily thrown over your body, and your ass is rubbing against his crotch while small, needy whines escape your lips. The scent of your heat has been impregnated in every corner of the entire room overnight and as he breathes it in, his body reacts to it automatically. If he wasn’t hard as a rock before, he is now

Dean swallows with difficulty, trying to fight the rut he’s about to go into. He lifts himself up in one arm and leans closer, trying to roll you over to get a better view of you.

“[Y/N]?”

He’s surprised by how wrecked and deep his voice sounds. Your eyes are closed, your brow tensed as your eyebrows are brought close together, jaw clenched. You are in pain, he realises. When you don’t respond to his call, he knows he’s going to have to be in charge. Then, when you press your ass against him with more urgency, requesting with your body that which you can't with words, he knows what he’s got to do, what you need from him.

“It’s okay,” he tries to comfort you, speaking through gritted teeth, trying to fight the urge to just let himself go wild and ravage your body. No, he will be gentle with you, as much as he can, he owes you that much. “It’s okay, I’ve got you, I’ll take care of you.”

His hand doesn’t hesitate when it travels down to yank your panties down. He pulls them as far down your legs as he can, then kicks them away. The touch of his skin on yours burns you and you whimper again in anticipation. When he pulls his boxers down, his erection sprints free and presses against your ass. You press your body impossibly closer to his, searching for the release your body needs and Dean hisses, closing his eyes at the sweet friction.

“I’m here, I’m here, [Y/N],” he whispers into your ear.

Dean hooks one arm under your knee and lifts your leg closer to your ribs while he lets you to continue to rest on your side, trying to keep you as comfortable as possible, as he lines his cock with your entrance. He groans when he feels just how wet you are and rubs himself against your folds, using you to get himself nice and slick before he finally pushes into you. The Alpha holds his breath in concentration when he begins to press the head of his cock into your warm pussy, which stretches willingly as he goes. You let out a loud moan as he buries himself into you, entering as easily as if he'd been playing with you for hours in preparation, and Dean can’t help the grunt that rumbles on the back of his throat. Both of you close your eyes, almost losing your minds to the pleasure, and then Dean’s moving out, conscious of how every inch of him feels as it drags against your insides, to then roll his hips forwards once more and start the process again. You feel so warm around him, so wet, and your little whimpers and moans are so encouraging that soon his inhibitions are crumbling and he starts pounding faster and harder into you, the dry sound of skin slapping against skin all that accompanies your cries of pleasure. You make yourself small, curling in on yourself with your back still against his chest, letting him handle you as he pleases, lost in his smell and the feel of him stretching you out. His free hand snakes around your body and comes down you rub two fingers against your folds, dancing over your clit.

“Dean!” you cry out in bliss, your breathing ragged and uneven.

His heart jolts at the sound of his name on your lips. It’s the sexiest, most broken way anyone has ever called him. He opens his eyes, trying to lock his gaze with yours, but yours are still tightly shut. Seeing you like that, so willing, so lost in him, drives him mad. He thinks he never wants to see you with clothes again, never wants to see another expression on your face that isn’t this one of you feeling him entering you mercilessly over and over again, your mouth agape, tears forming in your eyelashes.

Soon his knot starts to swell. He’s not going to last much longer, but by the way he feels your walls suddenly clenching around him while you inhale sharply and become quiet for a moment right before you let out a long muffled cry against the sheets, it doesn’t seem to be a problem. You stretch out your neck invitingly when you feel him swelling and beginning to get locked inside you. It’s out of instinct, and just as naturally, he leans in and bites down hard on your neck, gaining a another loud moan from you and you once more cum and squeeze your pussy around him. The act sends white stars clouding Dean’s vision and he comes, his dick twitching inside you as it spills cum into you. He can’t breathe for a couple of seconds, overwhelmed by the many things he’s feeling.

It takes him a moment to regain control. Having fully mated you and knotted you, he pulls you impossibly closer to him, holding you with tenderness now that the urgency of the moment is gone. He lets your leg come down to rest on the mattress and licks at your wound gently, stopping from time to time to whisper sweet promises - _I’ll always protect you, I’ll give you everything you need, I’ll care for you, I’ll make you happy._ You sigh contently and let him cuddle you, your arms snaking around his and holding him just as close as he holds you. Everything’s alright, for a moment time stops, the heat in the surface of your skin gives in and you feel pleased, complete and, very literally, _full_.

“You rest now, [Y/N],” he whispers into your ear, then gently licks at your wound again. “I’ll be here when you need me again.”

On the first day, Dean doesn’t manage to get out of bed. Your constant need to be knotted has him busy all morning, afternoon and evening. All day, he does all the work more than willingly, allowing you to lay down as he takes you in different ways; from behind seems to be the preference that day as you continue to press your ass against him in invitation every time a new wave of need hits you. He crawls onto his knees and settles behind you more than gladly as you lift your ass in the air and present it to him, the filthiest and most awesome gift you could ever give him. His rut never fully breaks out since he finds constant comfort in your presence just as you do in his, so he manages to be gentle, even though you don’t seem to mind him being a little rough either sometimes. He runs his hands up and down your back, massages your shoulders as he grabs you from there to keep you in place as you bounce in and out of him, kisses your neck, licks again and again at the fresh wound in your neck, keeping a careful eye on it. At night, when you finally seem to be done for the day, he pulls you into his chest and watches you sleep for a couple of minutes before he finally gives in too with a stubborn smile on his face; already he feels the bond growing, changing him and the way his body feels, the affection for you being sealed forever in the blood that runs through his veins. It brings him comfort, it brings him much needed peace, even if it isn’t real, even if you don’t love him.

The second day of your heat it’s quite similar as the first one but with some improvements. For starters, Dean manages to sneak out of the bed, if only for a couple of minutes, to get water and bananas. You’re a little bit more active during sex, thrusting down to meet his movements, calling his name more often, opening your eyes to watch him over your shoulder. You see the muscles of his stomach tensing as he fucks you, see the look of concentration, the way he bites his lower lip and grunts as he looks down to see himself coming in and out of you, and you’d be lying if you said you only liked it because of your heat. Dean is beautiful, truly beautiful, his muscles not sharply defined but still notoriously strong and lean, his face that of an angel. If that’s the Alpha who is going to put a pup on you, so be it. Not to mention he takes his role of caring for you and pleasing you very seriously; if he’s not ready to go again and you are, he doesn’t leave you waiting. Dean settles between your legs, his face buried in your cunt, humming contently like he was born to be there. He goes at it, kissing and licking your folds with eagerness, spreading you with his fingers as far as his knuckles will go, buying himself some time and also turning himself on on the process because the cries coming from you are music for his ears. Your rotten mind thinks with amusement that he’s going to have a hard time washing off the scent of your pussy from his face by the time the heat’s done.

On the third day, in the afternoon, the two of you manage to have a small conversation. You’re resting with your head on his chest, a hand on his ribs gently caressing him, humming contently after being knotted. Dean plays with your hair, asks you if you’re okay, if he can get you anything, makes you have some water. He kisses and licks your mating mark when you confess it stings a little. When he sees you falling asleep, he sights, rather relieved; truth be told, he’s starting to get a little sore, the heat taking a toll on him too. The loud complain coming from his stomach has him making a run for the kitchen.

 _Something fast_ , he thinks wisely, because surely soon you’ll be needing him again.

Indeed, he’s barely had time to finish the eggs when you come climbing down the stairs, completely naked and shaking. He jumps when you’re suddenly behind him, your arms hugging him from behind and tugging at his underwear, letting it drop to the floor. Dean turns around, flustered, looking anxiously out the windows to check for neighbours that might see the two of you.

“Alpha, please,” you beg him, then nip at his neck.

“You’re gonna have to give me a minute, sweetheart,” he replies, blushing with embarrassment.

“Are you tired?” you ask, your fingertips ghosting over his skin as they travel down his stomach, stopping when you feel the line of hair around his shaft. Dean holds his breath without realising it, and nods. “I’ll help you, Alpha. You don’t have to be so nice, you know? You can be demanding too, Dean, I like it rough.” you smirk, nipping at his earlobe with your teeth playfully.

Dean’s eyes are wide open, jaw drops, as you drop to your knees with a devilish grin. You grab his ass with one hand, urging him forwards, and cup his balls with the another as you take his semi-hard cock in your mouth.

“F-fuck,” he mutters, falling back with his hands against the counter as his cock twitches with interest inside your mouth.

You begin to massage his balls and lick his dick until it starts to grow inside your mouth. Soon, it starts to get too big for you and you gag around him. You move your head back to release him, but suddenly the Alpha in him kicks in and he fists your head with one hand as he grabs your chin with the other, holding you in place.

“Open wider,” he commands on a hoarse voice and you obey.

He moves carefully at first, testing how far he can go, how much you can take, until the head of his length hits the back of your throat. You swallow, your mouth clenching around him, and he hisses, his grip on your hair tightening until it almost hurt. He holds you like that and begins to roll his hips backwards and forwards, fucking your mouth while you stare right back into his eyes, almost challengingly.

“You like that?” he asks, trying to sound dominant despite his ragged breathing. “Is that rough enough for ya?”

You close your eyes and try to nod, but his grip is too strong. He chuckles darkly at your failed attempt and continues to move as you lick the underside of his cock with your tongue. Precome coats your throat, the salty taste mixing with your saliva, which you struggle to swallow. The sight of him, the feeling of being dominated, it turns you on and a wave of heat between your legs reminds you why you'd come looking for him in the first place. Your hand leaves his ass in favour of touching yourself, a single digit quickly dipping into your pussy, by now coated with not only your natural juices but his cum. It's a small relief but nothing compared to his thicker fingers inside you or, even better, his knot.

Dean throws his head back and closes his eyes, your needy scent reaching his nostril, almost forcing him into rut now that he’s finally stopped holding back. You feel him as he starts to tense, his stomach clenching, accentuating his abdominal muscles. His rhythm stutters and you lap at his cock wildly, urging him to come in your mouth.

When he realises your intentions, he pulls from your hair until your mouth leaves him, causing an obscene loud _pop_ to echo in the (rather empty of furniture, thanks Dean) kitchen. Before you’ve time to react, he’s pulling you to your feet and then up in his arms. You yelp and hook your legs around his waist as you throw your arms around his neck. He doesn’t give you a single moment to adjust before he’s spreading the cheeks of you ass apart with his hands, fingers dipping into your skin with a bruising force, and sinking you down on him. You gulp for air and hold on to him for dear life as he thrusts into you rapidly.

“You thought I was gonna come in your mouth?” he grunts in your ear, panting. “I’m gonna knot you. I’m gonna knot you over and over again. I’m going to put a pup in you. You’re mine now.”

Dean staggers backwards as he cums, the front of your legs hitting the edge of the marble counter as he leans on it. The insistent rub of his pelvis against your clit sends you over the edge and, without thinking, you bite down on the crook of his neck. Dean’s eyes fly open and he chokes on something that sounds very much like, “oh, God!”, and a very loud moan the neighbours must have surely heard. A second orgasm overwhelms him, sending more cum shooting into you, and he hugs your body close to him as he tries to come down from it. Still panting and with his vision blurry, still holding you in his arms, he makes his way to the living room and sits on the sofa. Unable to move while the knot locks you in place, you straddle his lap and rest your head on his shoulder, lazily lapping at his mating mark. It’s not mandatory that Omegas mark their Alphas, though it is the other way around. You fear for just a fraction of a second that he might not have liked it, but he hums contently as your tongue moves over his neck, and even turns his head the other way to give you easier access.

“Now you’re mine too,” you whisper before falling asleep on his lap.

The following morning, you are more in control. Dean wakes up before you for once, and not because you’re rubbing your body against his to get him hard. He lays in bed with his eyes closed, enjoying the warmth of your body, your proximity, the contentment your scent is giving out for him to read. When you wake up and realise you don’t have any urgent needs that can’t wait, you agree to take a shower while he makes something to eat. Still feeling itchy, the surface of your skin a tad warmer than usual, you only throw one of his t-shirts over your head and don’t even bother putting your panties on, in case a wave hits you soon.

Dean has the computer on the counter as he makes sandwiches, Queen is playing and you smile, knowing he picked it especially for you. He looks happy, you can tell, at peace with himself. You didn’t think it was possible, but it makes him look even more beautiful with his symmetrical, soft facial features relaxed, a lazy smile pulling at the corner of his lips. He’s humming under his breath. You smile to yourself for a moment, feeling the peace coming through the bond; it’s contagious.

“Morning,” you greet him. You walk in and jump to sit on the counter with one leg crossed over the other. The marble is cold on your ass, it feels rather nice against your abused sex. “You’re in a good mood.”

He chuckles. “Overdose of endorphins, I suppose.”

“Yeah, I bet,” you laugh. “Jeez, I can’t even remember how many times we did it.”

He laughs again, licks his lips as he looks at you over the corner of his eyes. Then he stops for a moment and narrows his eyes at you. His smile falters. “Wait, are you serious? You don’t know? You don't remember?”

A voice in the back of your mind advises you to lie or bend the truth, but under his scrutiny, you find that you can’t and that also you don’t _want_ to lie to him. Still, when you reply, it’s not without some hesitation.

“Well… no, not all of it.” His face drops completely, the blood draining from his cheeks. He drops the knife he was using to cut tomatoes just a second ago and grips the counter for dear life. You jump off the counter and grip his arm. “Dean, what’s wrong?”

He looks at you, almost angrily, his chest rising and falling rapidly. “What’s- _what’s wrong_ ?” he repeats in utter disbelief. “I _raped_ you!” he exclaims. He looks away from you, leaning over the counter as he struggles to breath. “Oh, God. Oh, _God!_ Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I raped you!”

You’re too shocked for a moment to say anything but the troubled scent emanating from him snaps you back to reality. “What? No, Dean, that’s not-”

“You don't remember! That is like the _definition_ of rape, [Y/N!]!” he exclaims, moving away from you as if your touched burned him. “Oh, God, I am going to be sick,” he mutters through gritted teeth, a hand clasping over his mouth.

You grab his wrists and pull them away from him, holding them close to your chest as you try to make him turn around. You fight back when he tries to get away from you and stand on the tip of your toes to force him to look at you. “Listen to me!” you command him, all of a sudden feeling protective of him as you watch him shatter in front of you. “You didn’t rape me! It's just how the heat is, it gets all very blurry, I can't focus very well. But I wanted it, okay? Dean, look at me, please!” With a hand on his face, you force him to turn around towards you and meet your gaze. His eyes are shiny, his jaw trembles.. “You wanna know what I remember?” you continue, more softly this time. “I remember- I remember _a lot_ of pleasure, okay? God, I am gonna regret saying this later because you're cocky enough as it is, but _damn_ , you fucked me good, Dean. You're the best I ever had. And- and I remember you holding me afterwards, every single time. I remember feeling comfortable and safe.” _Loved_ , but you don’t say that. “I remember you taking care of me. So, please, don't think you did anything wrong because you didn't, you did good, Alpha, you did good.”

Dean closes his eyes and exhales deeply. His body shakes as he pulls you into an embrace. His hands snake around your smaller body and you feel them tremble where they settle at your sides. You sneak your hands under his t-shirt, seeking skin on skin contact to calm him down. Your nose buried in his neck, you press a gently peck over his mating mark and feel him shiver.

“I promise you, Dean,” you whisper, “I want you just as much as you want me.”

As much as those words bring him comfort, he doesn’t answer anything because he knows it isn’t true. He knows he’s falling in love with you.

The last two days of your heat are spent in a more relaxed fashion, as if you were two friends with benefits away for a weekend. You actually watch a couple of movies, eat almost all meals and drink some whiskey while you two discuss how you’d like your pups to be raised.

“No princess stereotypes, no only-pink if it’s a girl, no ‘you throw like a girl’ or ‘boys don’t cry’ kind of shit people say,” you tell Dean.

“Done,” he agrees.

“No forcing them to kiss strangers if they don't want to.”

“Like old ladies?” he wrinkles his nose and nods in agreement. “Yeah, I always hated that too.”

“What about you? Can you think of something?”

He bites his lips for a moment, then nods. “No hitting them, not _ever_ , not even the smallest of slaps, not even their butts. No religion imposed to them. No shadowing them like they're made of glass; let them run and fall and scrape their knees and have dirt on their clothes. And, hmm, also, no stupid names for body parts. Vaginas are vaginas and pineses are pineses.”

You laugh. “Couldn't agree more.”

“Oh, and I’d like to teach them how to hunt. My brother and I go out hunting from time to time. Would that be okay?”

“Can you teach me? I've always wanted to learn but my father-” you suck in a deep breath. You don't like thinking or talking about him, and by now Dean knows why. “He wouldn't have it.”

You don't have to tell him how your father shouted at you for even suggesting the idea of him teaching you how to hunt, how he tried to force you into your role of submissive Omega since you were a little girl, how he threatened you not study medicine of he'd cast you out of the family, or all the shit he pulled on you for years. Dean knows.

Your Alpha nods and kisses the top of your head. “Anything you want. Next time we go, I’ll teach you. We're probably gonna head there soon. You know, for the 4th of July.”

Dean lays his head on the pillow and closes his eyes. Staring at him for a moment, the peaceful expression on his face, your eyes wander to his lips. You realise then you've never kissed him. You try to focus and remember the first days of your heat, but there's not one kiss shared with Dean in even the blurriest of your memories. It occurs to you that Dean is not only aware of this but that he's probably been holding himself back on purpose; he's forced to be with you, mate you, and waited until you were okay with it to do it, but the Alpha’s been kind enough to still try to give you some sense of ownership over yourself. That is one decision that remains still all yours and he won't take it away from you, he won't kiss you, not even after all the things you've done to each other. Kissing would be somehow more intimate, more affectionate, more something belonging to those who really wanted to mate and love each other, so he won't do it, not in your lips at least. Truth be told, you wouldn't have minded making out with him during sex but maybe it is for the best so the lines between you don't get blurrier than they already are.

In the days that come after your heat, there's a clear tension in the air while the two of you wait for an appropriate time for you to take a pregnancy test. Two weeks, you read in the internet, is a good time to wait to get a clear answer from a test after conception. You tell yourself you're being stupid, of course you're pregnant what with all the times Dean knotted you, but there's a tiny poisonous spark of fear that worries you and keep you up at night; what if years of taking suppressants have damaged your body somehow? It happens, it isn't that uncommon amongst Omegas that take those pills for too long without taking the adviced breaks every couple of years, to end up having trouble conceiving or even becoming infertile.

“So, Dean, what would happen if I don’t get pregnant?” you ask him one day when the curiosity gets to you.

“Don’t worry about it, I’m sure you’re pregnant,” he replies nonchalantly, eyes glued to the TV.

You reach for the remote and mute it. “Come, humour me.”

He sighs and considers his words for a moment.

“I’d probably go to jail.”

Your heart drops. “ _What?_ ”

“Like I said, I already spent the money they gave me, so if I can’t give it back, I’d probably go to jail for a while. But, look, if you’re not pregnant by the time the year’s up, I’m pretty sure I can ask for an extension, okay? We’re already mated, it’s not like we didn’t _try,_ ” he explains quickly when he sees the panic in your face.

“They wouldn’t appoint me another Alpha, would they?”

The scent of your fear has Dean moving closer to you in the couch, putting an arm over your shoulders and pressing your side to his..

“[Y/N], it’s going to be fine. If you’re not already pregnant, which I doubt cause- yeah, I doubt it... but, if you aren’t, we still have time to try again. We can do it in between your heats, if you’re that worried, though it’s less effective. But, hey,” he gives you a little squeeze to get you attention when he sees you staring into nothingness, almost succumbing to panic. You look up and find those gentle, green eyes looking at you with determination. He’s so close you can count the freckles on his face, the different shades of green in his iris, and he smells so good; his scent if strong, protective, so sure of himself, so Alpha in a good way. “I _promise_ you it’s going to be fine. Have I ever broken a promise to you?”

You shake your head and snuggle closer to him, allowing him to comfort you. You feel a wave of affection for him run through you and you can’t tell anymore if it’s a side effect of being mated or just because you really care for him; he’s not just a name in a file anymore, but your _friend._

“Now,” he starts, taking the remote back from you to unmute the TV, “I don’t talk over Freddie but you _never_ mute Clint Eastwood again, okay?”

You snort and he shoves you playfully. His arm remains on your shoulders for the rest of the night, a comfortable weight that relaxes you until you’re nearly falling asleep with your head on his shoulder. When you two go to bed, each leaves to your separate rooms again. He doesn’t admit he misses your warmth pressed up against him through the night and you just don’t even consider the possibility of sharing a bed when there’s not a need to do it anymore.

Two days before the two weeks are up, you come home after work with a pregnancy test already in your purse; you’d seen the pharmacy still open and just couldn't resist the urge to get them dumb test. You come in, close the door behind you and, knowing he’s already home, are about to ask out loud if he thinks you should just take the test already, when his distressed scent hits your nostrils. You wrinkle your nose; it feels uncomfortable and it makes your heart pick up its pace. For a moment you fear something’s happened to him but when you turn your head around, there he is in the living room, sitting on the edge of the sofa with his hands between his head as he looks down at a bunch of papers scattered all over the coffee table and a calculator. He’s frowning at the papers like they’ve personally offended him and his posture is tense.

“Dean…”

He jumps. When he looks up at you, there’s an _oh, it’s you_ sort of expression in his face.

“Hey,” he mutters so low it rumbles on his chest, making him sound quite crestfallen. You leave your bag on the floor as you move to sit next him, placing a hand on his knee before you ask him what’s wrong. He hesitates for a moment, going through the papers again before he drops them one more time, sighing with frustration. “One of the guys made a mistake. Long story short, he ordered the wrong amount of parts for a car, he thinks he made a typo and just didn’t realise it when he made the order. They cost a fortune but they’re already being delivered, and cancelling the order would cost me a lot of money. Now, I could use them in the future, but they’re just so expensive, I’ve no use for them right away and no way to make the money back fast enough to make up for the mistake.” Dean runs his hands through his hand and takes another glance at the calculator. When he sees your eyes drifting towards it too, he quickly turns it off. “God, I really don’t need this right now, not when we’ve started trying for a pup and-”

“Dean, don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.”

Your Alpha sinks into the sofa, avoiding your eyes the entire time, shaking his head as he takes the calculator once more and starts running numbers he now knows by memory, trying to find a way to fix this mess.

“Dean, seriously, stop,” you try again but he just won’t meet your eyes. You drop from the sofa to rest on your knees before him, forcefully taking the calculator from him and leaving it on the coffee table. “Listen to me, okay? We're good with money, really, don't worry about it. If you’re short on money, you can always ask me. It's one of the perks of having a successful Omega, remember?” you smirk and tap his knees, trying to bring out a smile on him. It doesn’t work.

He breathes in and out heavily, pinching the bridge of his nose while he thinks. “You're gonna have to be on maternity leave for a couple of months, before and after the pup. And I’ve already asked you for money. I don't want all the economic responsibility to fall on your shoulders, I wanted to have some more money saved before the pup came. God, I should have kept some of the money from the program, it was reckless of me to spend it all.”

“Bobby needed it more. Dean, I am serious, stop. I have _a lot_ of money saved. You need to relax.”

“Wish I knew how to,” he jokes, giving you a tired smile.

You sighed and then shuffle closer to him, your hands moving from his knees to rest of the top of his thighs as you push them apart. Dean sits back straight, bewildered, and blushes.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“You took care of me on my heat. You didn't just knot me, you- you made me feel- you did good,” you admit, blushing too. You place your hand over his covered crotch, massaging the bulge there, and his breath hitches. “Let me repay you the favor.”

His hand flies to yours, gripping your wrist tightly to stop you. “Stop. You don't need to do this.”

“I know. I want to. Your scent is making me nervous, come on, Alpha. You take care of me, I take care of you. Okay?”

You move your hand again once, tentatively, feeling his covered dick react with interest underneath his thick jeans, and Dean bites his lower lip. While he considers the offer for a moment, you see the hesitation in his eyes. You give him a small encouraging smile and he seems to believe that you really are comfortable with this, because suddenly he nods and his hand moves from your wrist to rest on top of your hand, leading it to stroke him a little more roughly. If the growing bulge between his legs weren't proof enough of his arousal, his scent is. You relish in it, the way it makes your own body feel good too.

You unfasten his pants and he helps you to remove them, lifting his hips to allow you to drag them down all the way to his ankles, his underwear going down with them too. He’s almost fully erect but hasn't quite reached its maximum size, which you're by now very familiar with. As you close your hand around him, giving him a gentle squeeze as you stroke him once, you look up to meet his eyes and he averts his eyes, cheeks colored pink.

You chuckle under your breath, finding his sudden embarrassment rather endearing. It's not like you haven't done this before.

“It's okay, you can watch,” you tell him, winking an eye at him when he meets your eyes again.

Feeling his eyes on you the entire time, you stare down at his warm length in your hand, admiring the pink tip, already leaking precome, for a moment. You lean in and lap at it, swallowing the salty liquid, feeling Dean shudder under your touch, a weak shaky breath escaping his lips. You smile with your lips hovering over the head of his cock, loving how responsive he is, how easily he breaks with the simplest of touches, and Dean just about has enough.

“Are you gonna help me relax or are you gonna keep teasing me, woman?”

“You’re bossy.”

“You like it,” he retorts, doing his best to sound cocky.

You can’t argue with that, so instead you focus again on the task at hand; distracting him, replacing his concerns with pleasure, the way he did with you when you needed him. Rather pornographically, you lick a long stripe from the base of his dick to the shiny tip, then sink your mouth on him, stroking with your hand what you can’t get with your lips. Then, you hollow your cheek and suck while you begin to retreat slowly.

“Fuck, yeah,” he breathes out, a smile pulling at the corner of his lips. He’s so out of breath you’re not entirely sure he classifies as _relaxed_ , but he is distracted as hell from his issues for sure. “Do that again,” he urges you, and you obey.

This time, though, you don’t pull out the whole way. You try to relax your throat and take more of him, inch by inch, as you bob your head, up and down, up and down, flattening your tongue against him. You fall into a rhythm, jerking him off as you suck him too, and it doesn’t take long for the Dean to lose patience and start thrusting into your mouth. You let him, you know he likes it, and you pull your eyebrows together in concentration to subdue your gag reflexes. Even when Dean is fucking your mouth, he’s gentle; he cups your cheek, stroking your once with his thumb, as the other works to put a lock of hair behind your ear and out of the way.

Dean throws his head back, biting his lip hard, trying to muffle the groans forming on the back of his throat. You take more of him, swirl your tongue around the head of his length, encouraging him to let you, get loud. It works; his mouth falls open and he moans your name in a way it’s carved into your brain forever. Not a minute after, he’s tensing up.

“Pull out, pull out, I’m gonna cum,” he warns you, unsuccessfully trying to get away from you but there’s just nowhere to go.

You dig your fingers deeper into his thigh to keep him in place and you continue to stroke him and suck him, humming contently around him, the vibrations of your throat making his cock twitch. Dean tries to hold back, even with your obvious permission to cum, but finally he breaks, moaning loudly in the living room as he holds your face, thrusting into you with short, sharp movements as he releases his cum. It hits the back of your throat, bittersweet and hot, and for a moment it’s a real struggle to swallow between the thickness of the liquid and his still erected dick in your mouth. When it stops and Dean relaxes against the couch, his chest falling and rising rapidly, eyes staring into the empty, you take your time to lick him clean and then pull away with a satisfied smile.

“There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” you tell him, then laugh. “Pun unintended.”

He chuckles with his eyes closed, still trying to recover his breath.

You think he looks really beautiful when he looks happy.

When three days later you tell him you are indeed pregnant after all, you’d expected to see him at his peak, the happiest he’d ever been, and although he does smile and kisses you on the cheek before lifting you up in the air in a tight hug, the good spirits don’t seem to last. He gets quiet later on, and at night when you pass his open door on your way to your bedroom, you see him sitting on the dark on the edge of his bed, his back to you, holding the frame where the photograph of his parents is safely preserved and you are pretty sure you hear him sniffle at some point. He loves them, misses them even more, he’s told you as much, but hating your own parents you’ve never been able to begin to understand how much it hurts him that he’s never going to be able to introduce his pup to his parents. 

In the first ultrasound a couple of weeks later, he tears up staring at the screen. The pup is only about the size of a blueberry, but there is the unmistakable heart beating. In all honesty, a fetus as big as a peanut doesn’t cause much of an impression on you, no intuitive maternal feelings suddenly awake in you, but it does the trick for Dean. You smile, more moved by his reaction than by the sight of your future pup, and run a hand through his hair. It makes you feel a little guilty that you don’t really feeling anything, that you’re not excited, and you wonder if there’s something wrong with you; you’ve never really been _eager_ to become a mother, and you fear perhaps you won’t be able to love your pup as much as you should, but at least there is Dean, an Alpha that cries at his pup’s first ultrasound. If Dean if half as dedicated to his child as he is to you, then you know they will be loved plenty.

With the concerns surrounding your heat and the pressure to conceive a baby out of the way, you finally let go completelyy of any reservations you might have still had regarding Dean, any fears about the future, and restrains still in you that kept you from making that house your home. A part of you still doesn’t like to admit it out loud, but you’re happy. You feel safe and accepted, you feel like you finally belong somewhere, with your little pack of four, five if you count Bobby, who you visit from time to time; Dean had insisted in going as soon as you did the first ultrasound because he just couldn’t _wait_ to show the old man the picture of peanut (the nickname you’d given the pup, which Dean kind of hated, which made it funnier).

Dean is good on his promise to teach you how to hunt. First he starts by teaching you how to shoot once the two of you travel in the 4th of July with Sam and Jess to a cabin in the woods, far away from any big city, where the concentration of fireworks might be denser. Dean is visibly nervous all day but it helps him to have you as a distraction; your scent and proximity helps him calm down, so you allow him to stand closer than usual to you, to put his hands on your hips as he helps you aim. Sam cooks, keeps beers flowing, but as the sun goes down and the time of the fireworks gets closer, Dean excuses himself and the two of you settle for the evening in your bedroom. He’d offered to sleep on the couch but you insisted they shared the bed. There aren’t many fireworks to be heard around the zone and they don’t last long either, but Dean still tenses up all through the show you don’t see but can still here, resting with his head on your chest as he tries to concentrate on your heartbeat instead of the sounds that remind him of things he doesn’t want to remember but can never seem to be able to forget. You hum Led Zeppelin songs, your voice rumbling on the ear he’s got pressed against your chest, as you massage his scalp. He closes his eyes and hums along. His hands never stop slightly shaking but at least he doesn't want to die anymore.

As your pregnancy progresses, there are good and there are bad things that come from it. The good news is, around your 19th week of pregnancy, you begin to feel this odd sensation in your belly. It feels like butterflies, like popcorn popping inside you, and it takes you some time to realise what it is; your pup kicking. Dean goes crazy over it and, truth be told, so do you. Feeling them inside you, it finally makes the whole thing real for you, and sitting on the sofa with your hand over Dean’s, which always rests on your stomach as he patiently waits to feel his pup kick, the odd feeling of the three of you being a family, a _real_ family, no matter how bumpy the start might have been, hits you like a train. You’re having a pup with this Alpha, and not just _any_ Alpha, but the kindest one you’d ever met, one that is going to raise your child the way you wanted. For the first time, you feel excited about having a child; like Jess once told you, you’re going to be raising the future generation and you and Dean are going to make sure it’s a damn good one.

The sometimes good but also bad news are now you’re mated and pregnant, no one gives you shit anymore. You hate that society finally accepts you because you’ve become what they all have always wanted you to become, but the reality is it’s refreshing not to be harassed or talked down to. It also makes forming relationships with other people easier, now that you can go about doing your things in peace without fearing running into particularly asshole Alphas; Jess had been right, that mating mark in your neck, not to mention the scent of pregnancy you now apparently emitted, was a repellent for Alphas. Now you were able to go out with your friends from work in peace; nobody bothered you at bars, nobody came up to you and tried to pick you up, nobody touched you inappropriately… which was good, of course… except you were dying to get laid. You and Dean had always agreed that you’d be able to do whatever you wanted, see or fuck whoever you wanted, once you’d achieved your goal of satisfying the demands made by the government, and now you had, you were free to seek pleasure in any person you wanted. Problem was, now nobody wanted you, nobody was looking to fuck a pregnant Omega, probably fearing to piss off their Alpha. Not even Dean tries to make a move on you; in fact, the Alpha treated you with so much respect and gentleness, it was starting to drive you slightly crazy. You thought back on what you could remember from your heat and you wanted nothing but to be manhandled like that by him again.

The lack of sex and the building and changing hormones begin to be too much, until you finally snap one day. You’re 4 months pregnant when you finally give up after hours of trying to shop for new jeans because yours won’t fit you anymore no matter how low you try to wear them or how much you suck in your stomach, and so you finally end up buying maternity clothes and dresses, neither of which you were a fan of. When you arrive home, Dean realises you’re pissed off just by your scent, even before he sees you coming in with the shopping bags, which you drop on the floor like they burn you. You sighed heavily, muttering curses under your tone, and Dean drops what he’s doing to check on you. He comes from the kitchen, drying his hands in a dish towel, and stops in front of you, looking at you up and down with concern.

“You okay, sweetheart?” he asks cautiously.

“No, I’m not okay!” you reply angrily. He doesn't even flinch, he just takes it patiently, waiting for you to continue. “I bought maternity clothes!”

The Alpha remains silent. He blinks a couple of times and when he realises that's it, that's all you're going to explain and he's no idea what it means, he frowns, utterly confused.

“Was someone rude to you at the store or-”

“No, they were all lovely!”

“Then what’s-”

“But it's not fair!” you continue rambling like he hasn't said a word. “This nurse at the hospital- you should see her, Dean! She didn't buy maternity clothes until she was like 5 months pregnant! God, and the clothes are so ugly, it's like they _want_ you to look utterly unfuckable!”

Dean makes a face like he's finally understood what the matter is and he gives you a sympathetic smile.

"I don't know about your friend's kid, but I am sorry to inform you Winchester babies are big. I mean, look at little Bobby."

You sigh, kicking the floor like an angry toddler throwing a tantrum. “Ugh, as if being pregnant isn't a huge cock-block as it is, your damn genes are gonna grow a monster baby in me! My body is not happy about this. I hate you so much right now.”

Dean swallows hard, so slowly you can see his Adam’s apple move in slow motion, and the man averts his eyes, fidgeting with his the dish towel in his hands. “I am sorry,” he says, his voice so low you have to pay attention to hear him.

Your heart drops. "No, it's not- I was kidding, Dean." You reach other for his hands, taking the towel away to interlock your fingers with his. "I am sorry, really, I didn't mean that. My hormones are all crazy and I just-...” You sigh and close your eyes for a moment, trying to come down from your rage. Suddenly you feel embarrassed. “I don't like the way my body is changing, I had enough body image problems as it is, Dean. I am not vain, alright? But I liked receiving some attention from time to time- when it was done politely, of course. Now I have _at least_ 6 more months ahead of me without having any sex because no one wants to fuck a pregnant Omega and my hormones are driving me insane. I feel like a 16 years old boy, my sex drive is so high up I can’t even fucking see it anymore.”

He raises an eyebrow and, God, you’re about to punch him because he’s actually suppressing a smirk. “Is that what this is about? You wanna get laid? You can always ask me, you know? I am your Alpha, I am _supposed_ to take care of your needs, _whatever_ they might be.”

“God, Dean, I know we're open about sex but I don't want you to sleep with me because you feel like you have to, that sounds awful, and I know I am not attractive right now, my belly is all swollen and my feet feel like-"”

“Let me stop you right there,” he interrupts you, raising a hand between you. “If you think being pregnant makes you unattractive, you are wrong. You are growing _my_ pup in there. You are going to give me the greatest gift of my entire life and that makes you the most beautiful woman in the world in my book. I am excited to see your body changing, okay? I look at you and I can't see anyone else. So if you think I don’t constantly want to pin you against the nearest wall and show you just how grateful I am, you're wrong."

For a moment you feel like the air’s been knocked out of your lungs and you blink stupidly, blushing like a schoolgirl. It’s been too long since you’ve had any action going on and just by hearing those words come out of Dean’s mouth while he insists in giving you this predatory look like he’s about to eat you out, it’s enough to have you already wetting your underwear.

“I- then- I mean, then why haven’t you?” you question him, your voice barely a shy whisper, anger now forgotten.

“I didn’t think you wanted to,” he confesses, shrugging like it was obvious. “After your heat, you went back to sleeping in your room so I just thought you wanted your privacy again now that you didn’t need me anymore.”

“What, did you want me to stay with you? In your room?”

He smiles gently, giving you that look that always warns you there’s something else he’s not saying that his eyes betray and say anyway; he adores you, truly adores you, in a way that makes this relationship more complicated and yet has you feeling happy, desired, _loved._ Dean _loves_ you.

“I always want you to stay,” he declares, pulling from your hands to bring you closer to him. You stumble towards him, holding your breath while he leans in, ducking his face at the last moment to avoid your lips and go for your neck instead. Then, he moves his hands away from yours to push you backwards against the door by your hips. You hit the solid wooden door with a dry thud and close your eyes as his tongue moves against your neck, a thigh coming between your legs to press against your core.

Feeling like a teenager but unable to help yourself, you grin yourself down against his leg, looking for that much needed friction you’d been denied of for months. Having him so close against you, so solid and so _Alpha_ , you can almost pretend you’re back on your heat, except you can definitely feel your swollen stomach being pressed against his.

“What do you want?” he asks hot on your ear, nibbling the skin on your neck for just a moment. “What do you need? Come on, Omega, use me.”

Fisting his shirt tightly, you push his body impossibly closer to his, rolling your hips again to rub your clit against his thigh. You whimper and bite your lip for a moment. You want to tell him to undress you, to go down on you, to fuck you however he wants for however long he wants, but at the same time you don’t ever want him to move away from you.

“I- I need you. Inside me. God, I need you so badly.”

He nods and before you know it, he’s lifting you up in his arms and carrying you up the stairs. He takes you to his room, dropping you in the bed. Dean stands by the foot of the bed, looking down at you with wild eyes as he sheds his clothes and drops them on the floor.

You’re so lost in his eyes, ogling him as he throws piece by piece of clothing to the floor, that you don’t even think of moving and taking yours off until he grabs you by the ankles and drags you to the edge of the bed. You yelp when he rips your shirt open, buttons flying in all directions, and throw your head back and moan when he moves your bra out of the way to suck at your sensitive nipples. He does it more gently than he used to, but it still sends shivers down your spine. He rolls his hips, his swollen member rubbing against your clothed sex, and you quickly reach between your bodies to undo the button and zipper of your pants. You need him, _now_ , fast and merciless, no more waiting, no more teasing, no more foreplay, you’re ready, you’ve been ready for a while now.

“I need it now,” you beg him, whining as you struggle with your jeans. He yanks them down with a single pull, along with your panties, and discarts them on the floor, never minding where they land.

“How do you want me?” he asks as he rubs himself against your wet folds, coating himself with your slick as he waits for an answer. The softness of his cock moving against you, the pressure it causes all along our sensitive area, nearly has you speechless.

Nearly.

“On your back. Get on your back,” you order him.

Dean obeys like the good Alpha he is, always so eager to please you, and you look down at him for a moment, admiring his dick, the soft curve of it, his bowlegs, the v shape of his pelvis, his beautiful stomach, his strong arms. You’re never going to get tired of the sight of him, no matter how many times you see him naked. Unable to wait another second, you straddle his lap and sink down on him as soon as you feel the head of his dick against your entrance. The first time, you feel every inch of him stretching you out as there’s still some parts inside you not fully wet and ready to receive him, but you don’t care, the burn of the movement still feels nice. You lift yourself up until he’s nearly out, only the tip remaining inside you, and then you go for it again until all of you is pressed against his pelvis. Buried all the way inside him, you smile contently and moan, choking in a little chuckle, before you roll your hips to rub your clit against him. He watches, transfixed, loving the happy, pleased look on your face as you begin to ride him quickly, your breasts bouncing as you move. He thrusts up to meet you just as you’re coming down hard on him and you nearly fall forwards. Dean catches you, hugging you close to him as he rolls his hips quickly, coming in and out of you as you cry out in his ear. It only takes you a couple of minutes to cum on his dick, your walls clenching around his length, sucking the cum out of him as he breaks too.

You’re too stunned to move for a couple of minutes as you try to catch your breath. Your left ear rings annoyingly, as it always does when you have overwhelming orgasms. Dean holds you as you come down of your high, whispering praises into your ear; _you’re beautiful, you’re perfect, I’m yours, I’m yours, I’m yours._

The guest room goes back to being a guest room. None of you plan on hooking up with other people any time soon, so sleeping together and having sex whenever one of you wants to sounds like the smart thing to do; you keep each other company at night, keep each other pleased when horny and you finally have a room for Bobby to use when he visits.

The pup keeps growing and so does your belly. Eventually you set up the baby’s nursery room. This time, when Dean is painting dinosaurs into the walls, you make no attempt to pretend you aren’t checking out his ass. While you’re at it, you also buy furniture for the rest of the house; not too many, though, you kind of like that there’s no much stuff that you need to walk around of. It makes dusting so much easier… for Dean, of course, you hate dusting.

Along finally comes Henry Winchester, a beautiful and healthy pup, big one too, like all Winchester boys. When you hold him for the first time, there’s not an ounce of regret in you. The only thing you can feel is love and the arms of your Alpha around the two of you. Motherhood isn’t easy, though, and the first months on maternity leave are hard; you miss your job and sometimes caring for a newborn baby gets a little overwhelming, but there Dean is always attentive and helpful, never taking you for granted, never expecting you to do everything just because you’re his Omega. Little by little, you fall into a routine, just the three of you, a new, tiny pack.

Henry’s a little over 6 months. Dean’s in the garden with his pup on his arms, holding him up in the air so the child can try to reach for the flowers in the trees. Henry kicks happily, his chubby hands closing around the flowers, smashing them. He shrieks, delighted, and Dean chuckles, looking happier and younger than ever, then he brings his son down to plant a noisy kiss on his cheek. It hits you right there and then as you watch them, how much you love him.

Shaking a little bit with the revelation, you walk towards them, wrapping your arms around Dean and planting a kiss on Henry’s cheek. Then you turn to Dean and you smile at each other before, very slowly, you lean in and kiss him on the lips. It’s a rather chaste, innocent kiss, and yet it’s the most intimate thing you’ve shared.

“I love you,” you confess, your lips hovering over his before you steal another short kiss. Henry’s trying to pull at your cheeks, but you ignore him in favor of concentrating on Dean’s lips on yours.

He smiles knowingly. “Took you long enough.”

**Author's Note:**

> actually-richard-speight ; ahoyspn ; bowlegschester ; capntony ; car inacatastrophicmind ; demondetoxmanual ; green-circles ; justjensenanddean ; softlesbian ; soluscheese ; thejabberwock ; xdeanskittenx ; yellina  
> (More than one gif might belong to one of these tumblr users)  
> (If you see a gif that belongs to you or someone you know, please let me know so I can give proper credit)


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